Nor is this a book about individual 'villains'. The Establishment is a system and a set of mentalities that cannot be reduced to a politician here or a media magnate there. Little can be understood simply by castigating individuals for being greedy or lacking in compassion. That is not to absolve people of personal responsibility or agency, to argue that individuals are just cogs in a machine or robots, blindly following a pre-written script. But it is to argue against any notion that Britain is ruled by 'bad' people, and that if they were replaced by 'good' people, then the problems facing democracy would be solved. [...] Personal decency can happily coexist with the most inimical of systems. [...] It is the behaviour that a system tends towards and encourages that needs to be understood.