Boris Johnson (Extracted from "The poor are being robbed in Labour's class war", Daily Telegraph, 8 December 2005

"[The] divide is not between the two front benches -- both now bristling with Oxbridge degrees and [private fee-paid] school educations. The real divide is between the entire class of people now reposing their fat behinds on the green and red benches in the Palace of Westminster, and the bottom 20 per cent of society -- the group that supplies us with the chavs, the losers, the burglars, the drug addicts and the 70,000 people who are lost in our prisons and learning nothing except how to become more effective criminals.

[Ed: We know where Boris Johnson, a deeply blue Conservative MP -- a semi-aristocrat -- is coming from, but he remains one of the sharpest observers of British life who writes in the press. Let me restate his description in terms of credit card ownership. The "fat behinds" represent the top 20% of the population who have credit cards for convenience and pay off their accounts every month. These are subsidised by the other 60% who are permanently in debt to some extent or other and have to pay interest every month. The bottom 20% don't qualify for credit cards. Not all developed countries have credit cards but this sort of class description applies to them, too. Significantly, it is not fashionable to call them "advanced" countries any longer because, since about 1985, poverty is growing in them all and social mobility between classes is declining steeply.]