ALL the naughty boy antics of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, which endeared him to a sizable slice of largely affluent voters, have worn thin. Johnson, like any UK prime minister, still enjoys the advantage of being free to alienate most voters because in the British electoral system a tally of around 40 per cent assures parliamentary dominance. But even some of that enraptured percentage are snapping out of it in the wake of a grotesque government performance.

How does a government entrusted to care for the entire citizenry instead channel every penny they can muster into upper class pockets? Tory Cabinet ministers don’t sweat over getting caught because they and their cronies suffer no penalties beyond a bad press. Tory schemes to reform domestic welfare only resulted in a misnamed Universal scheme that shortchanged all its hard-pressed recipients.

Meanwhile, the insider dispensing of ‘contracts for the boys’ is rampant and naked. We behold a divine indifference to what the unlettered public thinks because these elites have been taught all their lives that the riff-raff outside their circle are incapable of thinking. Strangely, it was leaks of unmonitored Christmas office parties in Downing Street that really incensed voters.

The ancient Athenians, as posh public schoolboys dutifully learn, believed that anyone desirous of power is not fit to have it. Yet Johnson’s Eton, Harrow, Winchester and other public (really, private) schools are deputed to transform hapless children into zealous members of the ruling class. The schools’ purpose is to churn out arrogant emotional individuals who take out their own angst on the ‘lower orders’. One of us recalls an evening with a band of 20-something graduates of such schools who boasted, if in a melancholic way, of the deceit, hypocrisy, class conceit and cruelty that those sites inflicted upon and cultivated among students.

There’s indifference to what the public thinks.

Racism of course is endemic. Just seven per cent of Brits attend fee-paying schools, as they more accurately are described, but are five times more likely than others to occupy top spots in politics, media, business and even sports, such as cricket and rugby. Two-thirds of the cabinet attended private schools, and the right-wing press delights in reeling off names of the (far fewer) Labour MPs who went to similar spots. The Daily Express, during Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership, decried the party’s plan to integrate the public schools into the overall educational system as “class warfare”, as if the existence of these schools were not an earmark of class warfare too.

The Daily Express had a point but, scanning the post-Corbyn Labour Party today, one sees a degree of clueless privilege at work that cannot be explained by, or blamed on, schooling alone. After Corbyn’s 2019 loss, Keith Starmer made great play of unifying the party factions but in practice lurched toward the Blairite right.

In the last 15 years, UK household income inched up 9pc versus a 50pc rise over the previous 15 years. Much of that growth was captured by top earners. The poorest fifth of Brits are losing ground. The majority of households have incomes that are below the mean income (£34,200 as of 2018). In 2016 the richest 10pc held 44pc of all wealth. The poorest 50pc made do with just 9pc. The wealth of the top 0.1pc doubled between 1984 and 2013, reaching 9pc, which is the same as the poorer half of the nation. An Oxfam study found the five richest families alone are wealthier than the bottom 20pc. Five families possess more money than 12.6 million people, the same number that lives below the poverty line. Since 2003, 95pc of Brits have seen a 12pc real terms drop in disposable income, whilst the richest 5pc have seen their disposable income and share of wealth increase. Does any of this signal a problem that politicians might want to address?

Obviously not. Johnson simply raised flat rate national insurance costs rather than hike graduated income and wealth taxes. His blather about “levelling up” got no financial backing from the treasury. Starmer, meanwhile, is counting on ‘Tory sleaze’ to waft him into office without so much as making a single corporate or financial titan tremble. His November shadow cabinet reshuffle invited arch-Blairites who treat Corbyn supporters, not Tories, as the real foe. The same Labour members who revile Corbyn’s progressive programme ironically played a role in his 2019 loss when hounding him into a compromise over a Brexit re-vote that was sure to antagonise northern working class communities.

Starmer’s shadow cabinet cling to talking points about national security, law and order, drink spiking, and getting slightly less tough on immigration but offer nothing to excite voters whose lives could use an upgrade. Nothing here for Colonel Blimp to harrumph about. It’s public schoolboy politics everywhere.

The writers are authors of No Clean Hands, Parables of Permanent War and other books.

Published in Dawn, December 31st, 2021