Bob Lyddon argues that Cambridge University’s acceptance of a £190 million donation to establish the new Rokos School of Government raises profound questions about democratic accountability, elite influence and who really shapes public policy in modern Britain. He contends that the proposed institution represents a further concentration of intellectual and political power within a self-reinforcing global elite, increasingly insulated from both electoral scrutiny and public opinion.
Cambridge University recently announced a donation of £190 million for the establishment of ‘The Rokos School of Government’.
Its published aim is to ‘prepare future leaders to navigate the ever-more-challenging demands of both domestic and international politics in a new and complex world of great structural change’.
The UK’s academic, cultural and political elite have warmly welcomed this donation, temporarily overlooking its source: they love money, of course, especially when all they have to do is lease the name ‘Cambridge University’ to something and the rent rolls in.
The rest of us should be outraged, because this will be a finishing school for the UK and global ruling class, concentrating even more power in their hands.
Source of the donation
Now we get a Rokos where previously we had a Soros.
Chris Rokos is the billionaire founder of a hedge fund engaged in the same kind of trading as the one run by George Soros, which reportedly made US$1 billion betting against sterling on Black Wednesday.
Rokos’ fund — Rokos Capital Management — bets on stock and bond markets, including UK gilts. This is the kind of fund that makes huge profits from events such as the Mini Budget of September 2022 or the outbreak of war with Iran. It is a type of ‘shadow bank’, a class of market actor about which the Governor of the Bank of England recently raised concerns in an interview with Reuters.
Having made their fortunes, such people seek to influence UK public affairs using their money, status and access so as to magnify their power beyond the one vote to which they are entitled in an election.
Mr Rokos has successfully bet on gilts and other traded assets, not necessarily to the benefit of the UK, Joe Public or anyone else apart from himself. That is fine — it is a free country. But why should his resulting riches entitle him to help formulate how the UK, Joe Public and everyone else are governed?
What it is for
The Rokos School is intended to be ‘a place where current and future leaders, policymakers and institutional experts generate the insights and solutions needed to respond to our rapidly changing world’.
Are not politicians supposed to do this during election campaigns and ask the electorate to choose the solutions it prefers?
The Cambridge Vice-Chancellor’s view is that ‘tackling the enormous challenges facing our world requires radical new ways of thinking and approaches to leadership’.
That is an interesting view: that all countries face the same problems and must adopt the same public-policy responses, with those responses designed within this college. One cannot have a situation in which different countries adopt different approaches to the same issue. This is the globalist view, of course: that globally homogenised solutions are the only acceptable approach, requiring global institutions staffed by technocrats to implement them.
That sums up the approach adopted since the Second World War, the very period during which many of these ‘enormous challenges’ have emerged.
Who gets a say
These ‘radical new ways of thinking’ will be the province of a hedge-fund-financed college at which only ‘leaders’ can participate.
Should they not instead be the province of inclusive public debate?
The Vice-Chancellor’s response would appear to be no: ‘Cambridge, with its strengths across all disciplines and its convening power, is uniquely positioned to drive this innovation’.
In other words, Cambridge possesses status, power and exclusive cachet, and therefore solutions must be designed within its closed confines by those deemed worthy of admission.
What sort of graduates is this ‘school’ likely to produce?
What might be the output of a college with ‘direct access to Cambridge’s renowned expertise in technology and the sciences, together with disciplines more usually associated with the social sciences, arts and humanities’?
Input plus process equals output.
The input — current and future leaders and governments — is subjected to the process: ideological conditioning delivered by ‘experts from across our institution’.
The output: leftist, Guardian-reading, UniParty, Remainer, elitist, globalist, technocratic managerialists.
Starmer raised to the power of n.
This is the precise opposite of the outcome desired by Joe Public.
International parallels
We are looking at a UK and global parallel to the French École nationale d’administration, the elite institution that produces France’s politicians (regardless of their supposed party allegiance), jurists, senior business leaders, MEPs, EU commissioners, academics, civil servants, diplomats and delegates to the management of EU institutions such as the ECB, EIB and ESM, as well as global institutions such as the World Bank, IMF and United Nations.
The 1% sitting within this magic circle rule over the remaining 99%: hapless and voiceless citizens consigned to their arrondissements.
Looking at the French social and economic model, and the way it has been run into the ground, it is difficult to argue that graduates of this system generate solutions. Rather, they appear repeatedly to generate both the original problems and the failing attempts to resolve them.
Why should the same not happen at the UK and global level? Why should the ‘insights and solutions’ needed to ‘tackle the enormous challenges facing our world’ emerge from the same exhausted elite who helped create many of these problems in the first place?
Who decided on this?
Naturally, this has been decided between two nominally distinct constituencies whose separation dissolves within the same elite circle: representatives of its money wing (Rokos) and its status wing (Cambridge University).
Who was not asked their opinion?
This proceeds without the inconvenience of consulting Joe Public — or Joe Public’s elected representatives — as to whether Joe Public wishes this college to exist, or whether Joe Public wishes it to formulate views on problems affecting ordinary citizens.
This point was illustrated clearly by Brexit. Brexit was portrayed by much of the UK’s cultural elite as too important and complex an issue for Joe Public to be trusted with an opinion. When Joe Public voted Leave, large sections of that same elite labelled voters racist or ignorant and have attempted ever since to dilute, delay, overturn or — to use the current terminology — ‘reset’ the result.
This new college will arrogate to itself the role of formulating opinions on public-policy issues and disseminating them throughout the ruling elite in both the UK and internationally.
Those opinions can then be crystallised into policies to be presented to electorates — or, preferably from the elite perspective, imposed while bypassing electorates altogether through the familiar toolkit of ignoring public opinion, undermining it once expressed, or avoiding democratic consent entirely.
Money, status and power
What we are looking at here is a further power grab by the global elite, using their influence over money and status to facilitate it.
Whether this college should be established at all, and, if established, what precisely it should do, ought to be subject to democratic scrutiny and control.
The way this proposal has developed is itself an example of a broader problem affecting modern societies: the increasing concentration of power outside democratic accountability. That trend should be resisted, not encouraged.
The globalist, managerialist, technocratic elite should not be permitted its own finishing school.
This proposal represents a self-interested alliance between global finance — in the shape of a hedge fund that speculates, among other things, in UK government bonds — and an arrogant, self-contained and self-referential Cambridge University establishment.
The result would be an even greater concentration of power outside democratic accountability and within the hands of the same narrow elite that helped create many of the problems the proposal claims to address, while repeatedly failing to solve them despite its ever-expanding grip on authority.
By Bob Lyddon.
Bob Lyddon is best known as a commentator on fiscal, economic and financial issues, but he is also a historian, having been awarded an MA with Distinction in 2021 by the Open University, his dissertation being entitled ‘King’s Lynn and the ‘new police’, 1830-45’.
