Alan's Reviews > The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It

A Christmas present from my daughter and currently my bedside read. However it's making me so angry I can't sleep, so I'll have to move it. For instance, Owen talks about how there is a derogatory programme about those on benefits, but none on tax dodgers. When Osborne talks about those who draw benefits as the same as muggers who rob you in the street, he neglects to tell you about his own scamming of the British taxpayer when he flipped his home to avoid capital gains tax, or how his firm hasn't paid tax for seven years, thus depriving the economy of around £1.6m. So he outstrips the whole of Benefits Street put together when it comes to scamming us.

Closer to home my daughter pays £600 a month for a pokey room in an ex council flat in London which has damp seeping through the walls. The landlord instead of doing his duty and tackling it with the massive profits he is making, blames the tenants for drying their clothes on the radiators. I was not surprised to hear he was a Tory councillor.

So do these people look in the mirror and confront their deep hypocrisy and feel the shame they should in profiteering from people who have no choice? No, they revel in it, they think it's normal, legit, to raid the public purses for their own greed. They live and breathe corruption and exploitation. They don't mind the stink of putrescence they fill each room with, they think up more ways to add to their, and their mates and their sponsors', already full pockets, laughing at the plights of the poor and disadvantaged. In any normal, civilised society these people would be shunned as the pariahs they are, in any normal society they would be locked up for fraud and dissembling, here, they run the country. This book tells you how they get away with it.