The Menu Is Not the Kitchen

On ruling classes, ballot boxes, and the comfortable lie that nobody is really in charge

In the RAF Police, power had the decency to announce itself. It was sewn onto sleeves and pinned to shoulders, and if you were ever unsure who outranked you, you simply looked. You might not have liked the man with more stripes, and quite often I didn’t, but you knew exactly who he was, where he sat, and whose signature ended the argument. Civilian life, I discovered, prefers a different arrangement. Here we’re assured that nobody outranks anybody, that we’re all equal at the ballot box and free to say whatever we please, and that the only hand holding the pen is ours. It’s a lovely story. I’ve heard it told in several countries and a few languages, usually by people whose names never appear on a ballot paper yet somehow always appear in the room afterwards…

So let’s ask the question properly, without the tinfoil. Is there really a ruling class, when most of us in the so-called free world can vote, protest, publish and complain to our hearts’ content? And if we have all those tools, are we simply missing a trick?

The conspiracy we don’t need

The phrase “ruling class” does itself no favours. Say it out loud in the wrong company, and you can watch people mentally file you somewhere between the chemtrail enthusiasts and the man at the bus stop who knows what’s really in the water. That’s a shame, because the more interesting version of the idea requires no secret meetings, no hooded figures and no bloodlines. It requires only one thing that’s entirely visible and entirely boring: time.

Anyone who has ever sat on a village fete committee understands how power actually works. The fete isn’t run by the most popular person in the village, or the wisest, or even the one who cares the most. It’s run by whoever can attend every single meeting, read every email, and still be standing when the vote on the tombola comes up at half past nine on a Tuesday night. Everyone else is invited, of course. Everyone else is welcome. Everyone else is at work, putting the kids to bed, or asleep in front of the telly, and so the fete becomes, over the years, the property of the people who could afford to turn up.

Scale that up to a nation and you have the whole thing in miniature. Nobody needs to conspire. The system simply rewards those who can participate full-time, and the people who can participate full-time are overwhelmingly those who are paid to, or rich enough not to need paying at all. That isn’t a cabal. It’s worse, in a way, because a cabal could at least be exposed.

The menu

Take the vote, our great equaliser. I’m not going to sneer at it, because people have died for it and plenty still do. But it’s worth being honest about what it actually offers. Voting lets you choose between dishes you didn’t cook, from a menu you didn’t write, in a restaurant whose kitchen you’ll never be allowed to see. The candidates were selected by party machinery, the manifestos were shaped by focus groups and donors, and the real decisions about what’s even on offer were made long before you arrived with your little pencil on a string.

The UK’s 2024 general election is a neat illustration. Turnout sat at around 60 per cent, the lowest in over two decades, and the winning party took roughly a third of the votes cast yet collected nearly two thirds of the seats. Whatever you think of the result, the arithmetic tells you something about how loosely “the will of the people” is connected to the outcome. A large minority of a shrinking majority is enough to hand someone the keys to the whole building.

Across the Atlantic, the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page published a study in 2014 examining nearly two thousand policy questions. Their conclusion was that American policy tracked the preferences of economic elites and organised business interests far more closely than those of ordinary citizens, whose views seemed to have little independent effect at all. In fairness, other researchers have since pushed back, arguing that the preferences of the rich and the rest overlap more often than the headline suggests, so the average voter frequently gets what they want anyway, simply by coincidence. I find that rebuttal less comforting than its authors might hope. “You’ll get your way whenever you happen to agree with the people who actually decide” is not the ringing endorsement of democracy it’s meant to be.

Free speech, paid reach

Then there’s freedom of speech, the other pillar we’re told to be grateful for. And we should be, genuinely, because the alternative is bleak and I’ve seen enough of the world to know it. But freedom of speech was designed for a world where the problem was being silenced. We now live in a world where the problem is being ignored.

I can say anything I like from a cave in rural Spain. I can publish it, share it, hashtag it into oblivion. Whether anyone hears it is decided by an algorithm owned by a company worth more than most countries, tuned to maximise engagement rather than truth, and answerable to shareholders rather than citizens. Speech is free. Amplification is sold. The man shouting outside the town hall and the billionaire who owns the platform have precisely the same legal right to speak, in roughly the same sense that a rowing boat and an aircraft carrier have precisely the same right to use the sea.

Traditional media is hardly a counterweight. Across much of the developed world, a handful of owners control a startling share of what gets printed and broadcast, and newsrooms have been hollowed out to the point where press releases are frequently published with barely a comma changed. You’re free to say what you like. You’re just not free to be heard over the people who own the microphones.

The people with the time

If you want to find a ruling class without resorting to conspiracy, follow the calendars rather than the money. Lobbyists spend their entire working week influencing legislation. In the United States alone, federal lobbying spending runs to more than four billion dollars a year, and that’s merely the portion that gets declared. Think tanks draft policy papers that turn up, sometimes almost word for word, in bills. Former ministers slide onto the boards of companies they used to regulate, and the committees meant to police this revolving door tend to have all the bite of a gummy Labrador.

None of these people are hiding. That’s the part the conspiracy crowd always gets wrong. They’re listed on registers, photographed at conferences and quoted in the business pages. They’re simply doing, as a profession, what the rest of us are supposed to do in our spare time, and they’ll always win that contest for the same reason the full-time footballer beats the Sunday league striker.

I learned a version of this in civilian security management, where I became mildly notorious for issuing memos that required a signature confirming they’d been read. It wasn’t because I loved paperwork. It was because I’d worked out that whoever writes the record ends up owning the history. Months later, when something went wrong and the Directors went looking for who had known what and when, it was my memos they reached for. Power, in organisations as in countries, rarely belongs to the loudest voice. It belongs to whoever holds the pen when nobody else is paying attention.

When the street does stand up

Now for the awkward bit, because the question assumes ordinary people don’t fight back, and that simply isn’t true. In the last few years alone, ordinary people have toppled governments with astonishing speed. Sri Lanka’s protesters stormed the presidential residence in 2022 and sent the president fleeing. Kenyan demonstrators forced the withdrawal of a deeply unpopular finance bill in 2024. Bangladesh’s student-led uprising the same year ended a fifteen-year premiership. In Nepal last September, a generation raised on the very social media the government tried to ban brought the whole cabinet down in a matter of days.

So people are hardly asleep. The cynical question isn’t whether they stand up. It’s what happens the morning after. Toppling a government is like pulling the plug on a machine; it feels decisive, but the machine is still sitting there, fully assembled, waiting for somebody new to switch it back on. In Sri Lanka, the immediate replacement for the ousted president was a veteran establishment politician who had served as prime minister several times before. The crowds had changed the face at the window and very little behind it.

And yet, Sri Lanka offers the nuance that keeps this from being a counsel of despair. Two years after the uprising, voters elected an outsider from a party that had spent decades on the fringes. The street provided the shock; the ballot, combined with patient and deeply unglamorous organising, finished the job. Whether that new government delivers is another story, but the sequence matters. Anger topples. Organisation replaces. Most movements are brilliant at the first and exhausted by the second, and the people with the time are always waiting patiently for that exhaustion to set in.

The mirror

So, are we missing a trick? Partly, yes, and I include myself in the charge. Local council elections in Britain routinely draw turnouts of around a third, sometimes lower. Planning committee meetings, where decisions that reshape entire towns are made, are frequently attended by the developer’s representatives and three pensioners with a grievance about parking. Union membership has been in long decline across much of the developed world. We’ve outsourced our citizenship the way we’ve outsourced our sense of direction to a satnav, and we’re equally baffled when we find ourselves somewhere we never intended to go.

A fair few of us have gone further and quietly opted out altogether, building private workarounds instead of fixing public systems. I’m hardly in a position to lecture anyone on that front, writing this as I am from a cave with solar panels. It feels like rebellion. It may just be abdication with better scenery, and the people who stay in the room are perfectly happy to see us go.

But it would be dishonest to leave it there, because blaming ordinary people for not participating is a bit like blaming a drowning man for not doing enough lengths. The system is built around time poverty. When people are working two jobs, caring for relatives, commuting for hours and staring down a rent increase, the fete committee is not going to make the list. That isn’t apathy. It’s triage. The genuinely cynical observation isn’t that people don’t care; it’s that an arrangement which keeps people too tired to participate has no reason whatsoever to change, and every reason to call their absence a free choice.

Stripes you can’t see

I keep coming back to those stripes on a sleeve. The military version of power was blunt, often unfair and occasionally absurd, but it was legible. You could see the hierarchy, argue with it through proper channels, and know precisely whose door to knock on. The civilian version tells us there’s no hierarchy at all, only free citizens making free choices, and it’s precisely that story that makes the real hierarchy so hard to point at.

Is there a ruling class, then? Not in the sense of a secret society, no. There’s something duller and harder to fight: a class of people for whom influence is a job, sitting across the table from a population for whom it’s a hobby they can’t afford. We have the vote, and it matters, and we have our voices, and they matter too. What we don’t have is the time, and I’m increasingly convinced that’s the one thing nobody will ever campaign to give us back.

I’d love to finish with a rousing call to arms. Turn up, organise, attend the boring meetings, stay in the room after the crowds go home. All true, all worth doing. But I’ve watched enough governments fall and enough machines switch quietly back on to know that the people who benefit from our exhaustion will be at the next meeting either way. The only question worth asking is whether any of us will be sitting there too… and if you’re honest, you already know what you’ll be doing on Tuesday night.

Until Next Time