D J Taylor: All roads lead to the A11

President Bush's address to the nation harboured two unusual features. The first was the curious zeal with which the soon-to-be-superannuated Supreme Commander approached his task. For a man summoned to tell his electors that the US economy looked set to implode, he had an oddly mischievous look, like an ageing pixie invited to the join the elves in a game of tag beneath the fairy ring. The second was the bare-faced way in which he let the cat out of the bag with regard to the US political system. Was there, in this talk of rescue packages and corporate collapse, any mention of accountability? Not as such, although Mr Bush did manage to keep a straight face while uttering the words "democratic capitalism".

The gist of what he had to say was this: they – a small group of people hitherto able to operate without very much in the way of restraints or supervision – have sent USS Corporate America straight towards the ice floe in ways that you couldn't understand even if we explained it to you. We – another small group of people, ditto – are going to have to sort out the mess; you poor suckers are going to have to pay for it, whether you like it or not.

Leaders of great Western nations are usually shy of admitting that they are oligarchs rather than democrats, but perhaps Mr Bush, doubtless overcome by the excitement of the moment, had temporarily evaded his scriptwriter's grasp.

* The oligarchical scent hung over one of the week's most reviewed books: A N Wilson's summary of our national life since the accession of Elizabeth II. Our Times (Hutchinson, £25) is an idiosyncratic work, which is putting it mildly, but his theme would stir a tremor of recognition in the breast of most American taxpayers.

According to the Wilson thesis, recent British history mainly consists of tiny political and cultural elites imposing their views on those of us beyond the palisades of SW1 and what used to be EC4, with "public opinion" shipped in to ratify decisions that have already been taken.

One of Wilson's key bits of supporting evidence is the reaction to Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech in 1968, in which Powell criticised – which, again, is putting it mildly – the effect of mass immigration on UK society. In the speech's aftermath, a team of sociologists analysed the 100,000 letters that Powell received. Hardly any of them turned out to be racist. Rather, their target was "they" – the mysterious, unseen forces that had taken a decision to transform British society without enquiring what the consequences might be for the "us" thereby transformed. And here, I realised, we were on familiar territory. My father, a scholarship boy from a council estate, believed in "them" almost as fervently as he believed in God: "they" being a vast, anti-meritocratic conspiracy deviously at work to obstruct his and his family's path through life. "That's shown the buggers!" I remember him yelling on the morning my degree result came through.

* To discover that the landscape you inhabit – a landscape of free elections and democratically elected politicians – is actually as tightly regimented as the average zenana, can come as a shock. So much of modern life is built on the notion of inclusivity. We are all fans, the argument runs, who count, collectively and individually, because the icons we cherish cannot prosper if that support is withdrawn. In fact, as the continuing saga of Newcastle United FC demonstrates in spades, the idea of a compact between fan and icon is wholly illusory. Mike Ashley, the club's cheery billionaire proprietor, began his tenure by presenting himself as the "fan's owner", was photographed in Newcastle shirts, watched home games from the stands and had himself driven to away matches in a white transit van. His next move, oddly enough, was to sack a popular manager and put the club up for sale at a vastly inflated price. At the moment "people power" looks as if it might yet do for Mr Ashley – last Wednesday's Carling Cup game attracted the sparsest crowd for years – but you get the feeling the ultimate victor will be a man in a suit in a boardroom rather than the men (and women) in the striped replica jerseys on the terraces, even if Ashley was masquerading as both.

* The idea that mass participation in anything makes it inclusive or even, to use another suspect neologism, "enabling", was thrown into even sharper relief by a midweek speech by the higher education minister, John Denham. In the week that thousands of young adults (including Princess Beatrice) embarked on student life, Mr Denham launched an initiative with nine of our leading universities – although not Oxford or Cambridge – aimed at improving access for students from poor backgrounds. The minister painted the usual roseate picture of half the country's 18-year-olds going on to a university education and using their qualifications to bag better jobs and bigger opportunities. Unfortunately, as even Mr Denham ought to know, it doesn't work like this, big employers having their own idea of what constitutes a "good" university and a "good" degree.

Back in the mid-1990s, when the Major government had decided to grant university status to the old polytechnics, I was working for an accountancy firm in the City. "Makes your job a bit harder," I recall saying to the graduate recruitment partner, "what with having to visit all these new universities on the milk round." He shook his head. Oh no, he explained, Messrs X and Y only recruited from... and here he named a bare six or seven institutions. The expansion of the university system was sold to its participants (or rather to their parents) on the basis that it provided, or would provide, a level playing field. But even a degree, these days, turns out to be a matter of degree.

* The pageant of vested interests, pundits and ginger-group spokesmen that habitually comes together to promote social or economic change is particularly noticeable at a local level, where the levers of power are more accessible and the policy forums more direct. Here in the Norfolk boondocks, the newspapers have been in a tremendous lather about the long-standing campaign to dual-carriage the A11, the principal conduit between East Anglia and the Home Counties. Politicians have signed up, a hundred businessmen had their names printed in the Eastern Daily Press, and the general implication was that anyone not keen on the inevitable "economic benefits" the scheme would bring was a sort of futile half-wit. Doubtless at some point – a very remote point, you imagine – and at vast public and environmental expense, the A11 will be dualled, but it will not be because anyone asked the local people if they wanted it done.

It is the same with the Norfolk Development Plan, the subtext of whose literature might be interpreted as: we are going to build a lot of houses, but we are obliged to pretend to consult with you first. The houses will be built, of course, for there is no box to tick for those who don't want them.

Just occasionally, the public strikes back. I remember watching the results of the general election of 2001 come through in the two Oldham constituencies and seeing the expression of horror on the face of Michael Meacher MP when it was revealed that 10,000 people had voted for the BNP candidates. It was a scandal, Meacher declared. The real scandal was that 10,000 people had so little confidence in the democratic system that they ended up voting for some fascist goblin.

But the expression of a genuinely popular opinion – whether from electors, football fans or American taxpayers – tends to scare those in authority stiff, to the point where you begin to question how the authority came to be there in the first place, and how it might be taken away.