Skipper

Anything written by an author of Yes Minister is likely to be interesting or revealing and Anthony Jay's piece in yesterday's Sunday Times was both. Seizing on a recent BBC admission of its 'liberal bias', Jay, who worked for the corporation 1955-64, fascinatingly elaborates from his own experience.

But we were not just anti-Macmillan; we were anti-industry, anti-capitalism, anti-advertising, anti-selling, anti-profit, anti-patriotism, anti-monarchy, anti-empire, anti-police, anti-armed forces, anti-bomb, anti-authority. Almost anything that made the world a freer, safer and more prosperous place – you name it, we were anti it.

This mindset has a resonance for like yours truly and many of my peer group. Jay's analysis of how it was formed starts with the simple but revealing insight that: 'the two principal ways of misunderstanding society: by looking down on it from above or looking up at it from below.'

To look down on society from above, from the point of view of the ruling groups, the institutions, is to see the dangers of the organism splitting apart – the individual components shooting off in different directions until everything dissolves into anarchy. To look up at society from below, from the point of view of the lowest group, the governed, is to see the dangers of the organism growing ever more rigid and oppressive until it fossilises into a monolithic tyranny.

Both offer true perspectives but neither is wholly correct. The former is the traditional viewpoint of the ruling elite, the bosses, worried about how their positions can be justified and maintained; the latter is the outlook of the lower orders, the worker, man in the street. Bosses, conservatively, like things to remain as they are; workers, more radically, want more rewards, status, freedom.

Jay observes that the media liberal hostility to institutions was not necessarily shared by the public at large: 57% in a recent poll said 'broadcasters often failed to reflect the views of people like me'. There is much in Jay's piece to commend and to interest, but it seems to me he is being either a little too hard on himself, or has swung excessively close to the 'top down' point of view.

The ruling elite's perspective is valid of course, but don't they have rather a lot of cards in their hand compared to the rest of us: money, authority, control of the instruments of the state? Surely the 'bottom up' viewpoint needed to be articulated? Especially, one is impelled to note, on today, the 188th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre. Without the consequent synthesis of the two perspectives, the changes in our society to make it freer, fairer and less like the gloomy, oppressive fifties, would never have taken place.