‘It is the £60 million Cabinet. David Cameron’s coalition government may have adopted “fairness” as one of its defining slogans, but his team of Ministers has been drawn almost exclusively from the ranks of the financial elite – leading to accusations that politics is once again becoming the preserve of the wealthy. Of the 29 Ministers entitled to attend Cabinet meetings, 23 have assets and investments estimated to be worth more than £1 million’. (Daily Mail, 23 May 2010).
The British ruling class reproduces itself biologically and economically. It does so through marriage, inheritance, access to private education and the elite universities and by controlling key positions in the economy and state. It draws new blood into its ranks and in so doing retains the loyalty of wider sections of society, who aspire to join its ranks. The British capitalist ruling class was established towards the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries with a compromise between the feudal landed aristocracy and the financial interests of the City. The current government demonstrates its unwelcome durability
Prime Minister David Cameron
David Cameron’s personal wealth is put at £3.2 million, but if his fortune is combined with that of Samantha Cameron, it amounts to over £30 million. David Cameron is descended from King William IV through the King’s illegitimate daughter, Lady Elizabeth FitzClarence; Debrett’s Peerage describes Cameron as the fifth cousin, twice removed of the Queen. He attended Heatherdown private prepatory school in Berkshire, along with Princes Andrew and Edward. ‘When the young Cameron was due to attend a job interview at Conservative Central Office, a phone call was received from Buckingham Palace. “I understand you are to see David Cameron,” said the caller. “I am ringing to tell you that you are about to meet a truly remarkable young man.”’ (Daily Mail, 15 June 2007). Prince Charles and David Cameron are members of White’s, the most aristocratic of London’s gentlemen’s clubs. Samantha Cameron is descended from Nell Gwyn, mistress to King Charles II, and her stepfather is Viscount Astor, also a member of White’s. Samantha Cameron’s father is the eighth Baronet Sir Reginald Sheffield whose family crest is a boar’s head framed by two arrows. He owns 3,000 acres of Lincolnshire. One of Samantha Cameron’s ancestors was John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, who had Buckingham Palace built, before the family sold it to George III.
David Cameron, like his father and grandfather before him, went to Eton school, costing £23,000 a year. Both father and grandfather were senior partners for the stockbrokers Panmure Gordon. After leaving Oxford University, David Cameron went to Hong Kong to work for Jardine Matheson, a conglomerate with interests throughout Asia and links to Rothschild’s merchant bank. His great-great grandfather, Sir Ewan Cameron, made a fortune selling war bonds with Rothchilds during the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese war. The Cameron’s ancestral home is Blairmore House in Aberdeenshire. Samantha Cameron’s father owns both the estate in Lincolnshire and Sutton Park, near York, which is open to the public.
Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne
George Osborne, at 38 the youngest Chancellor for more than a century, is said to be worth £4.6 million, with a £2 million stake in his father’s luxury wallpaper firm, Osborne & Little, a £2 million home in Notting Hill and another £600,000 property in his constituency, Tatton, Cheshire. He stands to inherit his father’s baronetcy of Ballentaylor in County Tipperary and Ballylemon in County Waterford. His wife is the daughter of the former Conservative minister Lord Howell.
Educated at St. Paul’s private school in London and Oxford University, George Osborne is one of a handful of millionaires invited to join C. Hoare and Co., the oldest and most elite bank in Britain, established in 1672. Most of Hoare’s 10,000 customers are families that have banked there for generations and most are expected to have annual incomes of £250,000 a year. Hoare’s has just two branches; one in Fleet Street, the other in Knightsbridge.
George Osborne was caught-up in the MP’s expenses scandal when it was discovered that he ‘flipped’ his second home allowance in 2003. ‘He switched his expenses claim, under which he demanded his mortgage back from the taxpayer, from his London property to a farmhouse in his constituency in Tatton, Cheshire. He bought the farm in 2000 for £445,000 without a mortgage, but after three years flipped his second home, took out a mortgage and began claiming interest of up to £1,900 a month.’ (Daily Mirror, 4 October 2009).
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg
Nick Clegg’s private fortune is estimated to be £1.9 million. Born in Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire, he was educated at the private Caldicott School and then the private Westminster School before going to Cambridge University. His father was chair of United Trust Bank and a trustee of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, promoting ties between Britain and Japan. Clegg’s father worked with Cabinet Minister Ken Clarke for a Japanese bank. Clegg’s great-great-grandfather was a Ukrainian noble and Attorney General of the Tsarist Russian state. His grandmother was a Russian Baroness, whose family left Russia after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
Clegg worked as a journalist for the Financial Times and as a policy adviser and speech writer for the former Conservative Cabinet member and then European Union Vice President and Commissioner for Trade, Leon Brittan. Clegg served as a Liberal Democrat Member of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2004. After leaving the European Parliament, Clegg worked as a partner in the political lobbying firm GPlus, whose clients included British Gas and Hertz. Deputy Prime Ministers are not given official residences, although John Prescott was given access to Dorneywood in Buckinghamshire, but Nick Clegg has been given a share, with Foreign Minister William Hague, of Chevening, the 115 room house and 3,500 acres estate in Kent. Clegg personally owns a £1.5 million property in Putney and a house in his Sheffield constituency.
Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander
Danny Alexander was educated at a comprehensive school in Fort William, Scotland, before going to Oxford University. When he replaced David Laws at the Treasury at the end of May it was revealed that he had taken advantage of a tax loophole to avoid paying Capital Gains Tax on the sale of a £300,000 property in south London in 2007. He declared the flat to be his second home and claimed over £37,000 in expenses on it in two years. ‘Mr Alexander took advantage of a tax loophole that allows people to continue to tell the tax authorities for three years that a property is their main home even if they have another house – in Mr Alexander’s case in Scotland – which has become their “principal residence.”’ (Daily Telegraph, 30 May 2010). The Alexander’s family home is in Aviemore, Scotland. No doubt in anticipation of things to come the Treasury Secretary claimed expenses to pay a firm of chartered accountants for financial advice.
David Willetts Minister of State for Universities and Science
David Willetts’ personal wealth is put at £1.9 million. He was educated at the private King Edward’s School, Birmingham, fees £9,900 per annum, and at Oxford University. He is married to Sarah, daughter of Baron Butterfield, who was a former Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University and director of the Prudential. Before he became MP for Havant in 1992, Willetts worked as a private researcher for the former Conservative Chancellor Nigel Lawson. Willetts was a director of Electra Corporate Ventures from 1988 to 1994 and has been an economic adviser to Dresdner Kleinwort Benson since 1997. Until recently, Willetts was adviser to Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, a German investment bank and made £80,000 a year for 40 days work each year as Senior Adviser to the actuaries Pantner Southall. In 2009 he tried to claim £750 for a shed base and £175 for a dog pen as expenses.
Willetts is a Visiting Professor at City University’s Cass Business School; motto: Cass means business, and Visiting Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. He was, until recently, chair of Sensor-tech Limited, a subsidiary of Universal Sensors, in which Willetts hold shares. Sensor-tech was founded in 1996 to develop and commercialise research carried out in Moscow’s Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry. Willetts is a signatory to the Henry Jackson Society, named after a US senator who was a leading proponent of US Cold War policy and based at Peterhouse college, Cambridge. The Society is dedicated to promoting ‘liberal democracy’ globally, by military means if necessary. On 19 July 2010 the Society hosted the launch event of the Friends of Israel Initiative at the House of Commons.
These are the people devising the policies that will drive millions of people into poverty, rob them of their homes and extinguish the hope of going to university for many young people.
Trevor Rayne
