UK: Bullington rules ok

SMH 13 August 2011 - Mike Carlton

The Bullingdon is an ancient dining club for undergraduate toffs at Oxford, all male, by invitation only. You need pots of money to join, partly to fork out for the uniform of white tie'n'tails with trimmings, but mostly to pay for the property damage wrought at the club's notorious orgies of drinking and destruction.

The British Prime Minister, David William Donald Cameron (Eton, Brasenose), his Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Gideon Oliver Osborne (St Paul's, Magdalen, and heir to a baronetcy), and the Tory mayor of London, the blond, bicycling and batty Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (Eton, Balliol), were all Bullingdon chaps in the '80s.

A few years ago, in a glow of nostalgia, Johnson recalled an evening where a pot plant was heaved through a restaurant window and ''the party ended up with a number of us crawling on all fours through the hedges of the botanical gardens and trying to escape police dogs". The mayor remains a gilded creature, once famously dismissing his £250,000 stipend for writing a newspaper column as "chicken feed". Ho ho.

There, in a nutshell, you have Britain today. As ever, the Establishment rules by its own rules. Trashing a restaurant is a jolly wheeze for the upper classes. Plundering the life savings of the middle classes is all in a day's work for the bonus'n'Bollinger banking brigade in the City of London.

So, too, is tax dodging: to pluck just one small example out of the ether, Rupert Murdoch's London Sun newspaper and his loathsome but now defunct News of the World made a profit of £89 million in 2010 but, through various corporate pea and thimble tricks, paid just £415,000 in tax.

Then there were those MPs, of all parties, building their country duck ponds and refurbishing their Knightsbridge flats courtesy of the voters.

At the bottom of this seething social pile you have Britain's underclass, the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, trapped in those urine- and graffiti-splashed housing "estates", where the syringes crunch underfoot and unemployment and crime are a way of life. Chavs, they call the youth there: Council House And Violent. Eventually the pressure builds up and the whole show erupts, as we have seen.