Russell Brand: Not the little man he'd like you to think he is (illustration by Michael Daley)

Across Europe there has recently been a rash of popular and populist books explaining the various crises through which our continent is going. No such work has emerged in Britain. Here the populist "state of the nation" books are coming from a quite different political angle. These books claim that "we" ordinary people are being held both down and back by an "establishment". They ride on feelings of inequality, powerlessness and the undeniable failure of many of our institutions. As with their continental counterparts, one reason for their success is that they are not onto nothing.

At the end of 2014 two books were released in the UK which covered the disgruntled politics of the moment from this peculiarly British angle. Owen Jones's The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It has a front cover endorsement from the author of the other book, Russell Brand, author of Revolution. Through cross-fertilising puffs and events the authors have helped each other to attain enviable sales and to dominate the non-fiction bestseller lists in Britain.

Both play the "us" versus "them" game without irony. If our continental brothers and sisters are blaming recent incomers for much of their strife, these British authors return to the old British underdog tune of blaming "the powers that be". By the end of The Establishment Jones even tries to resurrect the "working-class boys spilling their blood for the establishment's wars" theme. Surely not heard for a century at least?

Both works are, it should be said, littered not only with falsehoods but with sloppy and basic errors. At the less serious end Jones has Andrew Neil as the "owner" of the Spectator (he is Chairman of the company which publishes the magazine). At the other extreme there is a serious muddle over statistics, percentages and dates so that his most incendiary "original" figure (over the percentage of the top 50 publicly-traded UK firms with parliamentarians on the board) turns out to be simply wrong.

Nor is he any better on definition, a problem he is careful to absolve himself from blame over in his introduction. The establishment, he warns us, is a "shape shifter, evolving and adapting as needs must". Journalists are part of the "establishment" if they ever worked for the now-defunct News of the World, but not if they work for the Guardian. Think tanks and pressure groups which favour free-market economics are "establishment" because they are funded by people with "special interests". The pressure group Hacked Off, on the other hand, is not part of the establishment, despite being secretively funded by rich celebrities seeking to keep their personal failings out of the public eye. Goldsmith family money is capable of an especially noteworthy transmogrification. In the hands of the late Sir James, the family money creates "establishment" entities. Groups funded by Goldsmith's left-wing heiress daughter Jemima, however, miraculously become "not establishment".