The whole parliament looks like toffs to me.
Heck, most of Britain looks like toffs to anyone from another country.

If somebody paid my Council Tax, TV licence, energy bills, transport costs, telephone and broadband, maintained my house (and that of my ducks) paid me £400 a month to feed myself and topped it off with £60K pa pocket money, I might just be encouraged to develop the sort of foppish sneer much in evidence in Parliament.
Fortunately, a mild winter meant we still have chairs to sit on and we can thank the Saints Aldi and Lidl for ensuring our bottoms are still able to do so.

Perhaps the front benches could wear dungarees, string vests and ‘Billy Bob’ teeth, chew tobacco and spit copiously and frequently, the Speaker could attend with his ‘coon hound and Ellie May in hot pants.

Lobbyists hold the power, the electorate needs to find the money to pay them to bribe our politicians to do the job we already pay them to do.

It has a sort of Kafkaesque beauty to it.

“The whole parliament looks like toffs to me”

Toffs ! Not the word that I would use to describe them.

“We’re all in it together” doesn’t work because it isn’t, and never has been, true.

Try the Daily Mail from 23 May 2010:

The coalition of millionaires: 23 of the 29 member of the new cabinet are worth more than £1m… and the Lib Dems are just as wealthy as the Tories
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/election/article-1280554/The-coalition-millionaires-23-29-member-new-cabinet-worth-1m–Lib-Dems-just-wealthy-Tories.html

“We’re all in it together” doesn’t work, and never has worked, simply because it just isn’t true.

From a Press Association news report a fortnight ago:

Homecare for elderly ‘disgraceful’, report finds

Standard of care provided to elderly in their homes has been described as disgraceful in report by consumer group Which? Guardian: 16 March 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/mar/16/home-care-elderly-disgraceful-which-report

David Rogers, chairman of the Local Government Association’s wellbeing board, said there was too little money in the system “and without fundamental reform the situation is only going to get worse”.

Look like Toffs, Feel like Toffs, Smell like Toffs, are Toffs.

Unfortunately David Davis is only only the first stage of this, and has not confessed that they are.

If you link definition of toff as being educated at Oxbridge, then 70% are toffs. If you take it as being hereditary peer only Thomas Galloway Dunlop du Roy de Blicquy Galbraith is a toff. If you require both, then no one is technically a toff.

Sutton report, link below

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/r/_ylt=A7x9QV5ywHRP7DkAAipLBQx.;_ylu=X3oDMTBybWpoN25zBHNlYwNzcgRwb3MDMgRjb2xvA2lyZAR2dGlkAw–/SIG=151018ekf/EXP=1333080306/**http%3a//www.suttontrust.com/research/the-educational-backgrounds-of-government-ministers-in-2010/Ministerseducationalbackgrounds2010-final.pdf

Some care is needed about labelling all Oxbridge graduates “toffs” regardless.

Try Labour PMs: Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair were Oxbridge graduates and so were many Labour frontbenchers such as Hugh Dalton, Douglas Jay, Hugh Gaitskell, Richard Crossman, Tony Benn, Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey, Barbara Castle, Tony Crosland, Dick Taverne, William Rodgers, Michael Foot, Shirley Williams, David Owen , Peter Mandelson etc.

I’m not an Oxbridge graduate. My son is but then his grandfathers were an accounting clerk with no qualifications who left school at 14 and a railway guard. How come? My son went to that maintained selective school down the road which scores better average A-level results than Eton. The grammar schools were and are an important vehicle for social mobility.

I was picking up the Oxbridge requirement from a Wikipedia which quoted the etymology of the word. In fact that definition required both a title and an Oxbridge educaiton.

Thomas Galloway Dunlop du Roy de Blicquy Galbraith went to UEA. I’ve just noticed that George Young would have been at Oxford when he had inherited his Baronacy, so he is a toff using this definition.

The Sutton report posted show quite a remarkeable degree of privilege and lack of wordliness in the current government.

Mind you, the calibre of non-Oxbridge cabinet members is interesting: Andrew Lansley, Caroline Spelman, Eric Pickles, Ian Duncan Smith, Sayeeda Warsi… no toffs there… (Lansley went to Exeter, popular with Oxbridge rejects)

It’s instructive to compare front line politicians who made it without having been to Oxbridge, like Ernest Bevin, Aneurin Bevan, John Stonehouse, Alan Milburn, Norman Tebbit, Lord Young, John Major . . .

Perhaps contrary to expectations, John Prescott went to Ruskin College, Oxford.

@6 – What? I have to disagree – They really ARE all in it together!

A really inteligent and intelectual artickle. I love your blog. Lib Dems will be in government ourselves next time, with an overall majority.

The Tories are toffs.