UK budget row

The budget has caused a deal of uproar with comments like this

"The tories will attack anyone and everyone that they don't perceive to be one of their own - White, Etonian/public school, Oxford/Cambridge, old school tie, land owning, bank running millionaires. Not much chance of most people getting into that demographic, although they will favour their lap dogs as the budget has shown."

It is typical of the criticism coming from the Left. It is off the point. Forget their colour, forget their education. There is only one thing that counts. Land owning on the largest scale.

Britain is run for the benefit of the handful of people who own most of it, such as the half-dozen "aristocratic" families who own the most valuable areas of Central London, their ancestors having got hold of it mostly by near-fraud about 400 years ago. Though do not forget the Oxbridge colleges, some of whom are also big-time landowners and would not allow anything to be taught that brought this state of affairs to wider public attention. All the other privileges follow.

This caste has cleverly got a lot of other people on-side by encouraging ownership of the teeny-weeny bit of land their homes stand on and kidding them that they own it when really the banks usually own it. How many people actually own both the land their homes and places of work stand on?

When there was the threat of socialist revolution, they were willing to give a bit by allowing people to have a welfare state, but with that threat gone, they will gather up all their old privileges and leave everyone else in penury. Think of one of the middling countries of South America - that is where Britain is heading. The squalor in Britain's public realm is already marked in comparison to the rest of Western Europe. It will be downhill all the way.

The only danger is they could miscalculate and then things will get ugly, but the army and the police will always be available to sort things out. A few can and will escape to mainland Europe, which will drain Britain's talent, but for the majority, there is no longer the safety-valve of countries like Australia.

Be afraid.