Panic In Action

The Professional-Managerial Class feels the chill winds of change around its privileged status – and it doesn’t like it.

I’M SURE SHE doesn’t mean to be, but Deborah Russell is a near perfect illustration of status panic in action. Her extraordinary online interaction with retired judge David Harvey as he made his submission on the Regulatory Standards Bill (RSB) to the Finance and Expenditure Committee, epitomises the Left’s acute sensitivity to what it clearly perceives to be a serious and growing threat to its ideological hegemony.

Russell’s performance, an aggressive mixture of one-upmanship, self-referential credentialism, academic name-dropping, and plain, old-fashioned rudeness, revealed just how frightened “progressive” members of the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) have become of intellectual challengers. And rightly so. Harvey, with years of experience on the bench, was not in the least discomforted by Russell’s intervention – “What notion of ‘Liberty’ are you working with?” – and had no difficulty in parrying her rhetorical thrusts.