Your report (Labour calls on Tories to reveal which ministers met elite donors’ club, 1 August) on Ben Elliot and his role in assisting the super-rich gain access to the best events and social circles that Britain has to offer, while at the same time raising funds from them and others for the Conservative party, underlines the dishonesty of the distinction that David Goodhart – and after him Theresa May – made between people from “somewhere” and people from “anywhere”.
Goodhart’s anywheres were identified as intellectuals: people who like cooking foreign food and taking holidays abroad, as against the solidly patriotic British (who holiday in Benidorm and eat pizza). The real anywheres, in contrast, keep much of their money abroad, are involved in offshore firms and avoid paying UK tax as far as they possibly can.
Ben Elliot, like many in London, has made a successful career out of catering to this offshore world. Meanwhile, those whom Goodhart dismissed as insufficiently patriotic have been working in underfinanced schools, the underfinanced NHS and elsewhere in the public sector, trying to hold this country together.
William Wallace
Liberal Democrat, House of Lords
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