The British Imperial Establishment, Post Imperial Era, and the ‘Churchillian’ World View, 1945-2016. (Adjustments & Challenges in Contemporary British Diplomatic Strategy)

17

policy
decisions of American government in the last generation, such as the
bombing of Hiroshima and the commitment
to the Korean war illustrates the
enormous centralization of the means of decision-making in the hands of a
very
few institutional office-holders.”13 In the United States the
multiplicity of small
businesses have been dwarfed by large inter-related corporations. A
massive
military hierarchy has grown up in place of the various state militias, and federal
government
dominates the several states and centralized previously scattered
powers. The British ruling class, on the
other hand, is a combination of
institutional and class position. A detailed study of this will be made later
on in
this chapter. However, it could be said that Britain enjoys oligarchical leadership.
Power in
Britain is held by people who share similar backgrounds and beliefs.
Their sons also benefit from the
facilities that are available to them in order to
reach similar ranks.

There
will be considerable disadvantages for a government which depends
solely upon military power to maintain
control. In the long term it is important
for all people in positions of power that they should have their
position recognised
as legitimate (rightful) by those over whom they have power. Professor B. Crick
in
his article “Basic Concepts For Political Education” has this to say: “. . probably
all
governments require some capacity for or potentiality of force or violence, but
probably no government can
maintain itself through time, as distinct from
defence and attack at specified moments, without legitimising
itself in some way,
getting itself loved, respected, even just accepted as inevitable, otherwise it
would
need constant recourse to open violence – which is rarely the case.” 14

In this
respect the exercise of power becomes a matter of authority.
Authority is the quality of being able to get
people to do things because they think
the individual or group has the right to tell them what to do. Those
in authority
are followed because it is believed that they fulfil a need within the community

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