Society

Let's hear it for Charles Moore, the Spectator and FT. Their attacks on the feral elite contrast with a virtually silent Labour


Against type: Charles Moore, the former editor of The Daily Telegraph. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian

Once again a spectre is haunting Europe. But don't look to the left for any pointers. Instead, keep up with some very interesting voices on the right, and their increasingly feverish interest in some fundamental issues: the position of wealthy and unaccountable elites, the extent to which supposedly liberalised economies have been fixed in their favour, and a restive public mood across the globe.

It all began in July, when the former Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore wrote a piece so against type that it endlessly bounced around the Twittersphere. "It turns out – as the left always claims – that a system purporting to advance the many has been perverted in order to enrich the few," he wrote. Over the summer, as the same rather panicked sentiments have been voiced by a handful of other Tory-inclined observers and insiders, the Spectator has run two covers featuring caricatured images seemingly drawn from old Bolshevik posters: last week's issue includes a piece that took sharp aim at the "undeserving rich".

Meanwhile, some of the best analysis of where the world now finds itself can be found not in organs of the radical left, but publications followed closely by the business establishment. Try this: "Many of the revolts of 2011 pit an internationally connected elite against ordinary citizens who feel excluded from the benefits of economic growth, and angered by corruption." That's from Gideon Rachman, the chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times, who also thinks that 2011 might one day be compared to 1968 and 1989, in a far wider sense than the Arab spring.

Clearly, all these voices are on to something. There are obvious threads that link the Spanish indignados and protesters in Greece and...