Broke

Who Killed the Middle Classes?

David Boyle

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780007491056
• eBook ISBN: 9780007491049
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The average UK price of a house in 1952 was £1,800.
The average debt per UK household in 2011 was £53,000.

1

The scene of the crime

‘I still look up to him [the upper-class man] because, although I have money, I am vulgar. But I am not as vulgar as him [the working-class man], so I still look down on him.’

Ronnie Barker, as the middle-class man,
in The Frost Report, 1966

Shona Sibary is a Daily Mail columnist who reveals the intimate details of middle-class life, from the woman’s point of view. Her husband Keith and son Monty have regular walk-on parts in this everyday story of suburban folk. But none of her revelations struck a chord quite like the description of losing her £400,000 family home in 2009, after remortgaging four times and seeing the mortgage payments rise by £3,000 a month.¹

It was a moving and honest account, as she described the misery of driving past her old house every day. ‘What I could never have known is how soul-destroying it is to raise children in a house that is not your own,’ she wrote:

Sometimes it feels like we are guests in the one place we should feel ourselves. So when Dolly draws on the wall with crayon or Monty spills juice on the carpet, I know at the end of our lease these normal spots of family life will be totted up as wear and tear and added to our bill. I miss marking the children’s heights on a wall, to look back on in years to come. And, last year, we couldn’t bury our beloved labrador in the garden when he died. I’m pretty sure that digging graves for family pets is not permitted in the tenancy agreement.

Shona Sibary got into the financial mess she did partly by sticking with such determination to the commitment to educate her children privately, and that made her the target for some criticism. The decision to endlessly remortgage is not in her favour either, as the angry middle-class readers of Mumsnet pointed out in furious terms. Of course, lots of people have to bring up children in a home that is not their own, but there is something about this angst-ridden glimpse that will be recognized at once by homeowners everywhere. The terrifying fall from grace that the middle classes dread in all ages. The submission to the power of the landlord. The loss of freedom to manage your family in your own peculiar way if you want to.

There is familiar horror and fascination about any middle-class eviction, and any painful revelations about the gap between middle-class appearance and desperate reality. That may explain why the media have often returned to this theme since the financial collapse of 2008. There is a thrilling there-but-for-the-grace-of-God feeling about it, a relief that – for all our own money troubles – we have so far avoided that particular pitfall.

But there has been a further element to the media coverage, as if there was a bit of a mystery to be solved. Why is it, asked the Daily Mail in another article, headed ‘The nouveau poor’, that families on twice the average UK household income are in such desperate financial straits? ‘We don’t put the heating on very much at all, even during that freezing spell in December,’ said Christina Reynolds, who runs a catering company in south-east London, and earns £60,000 together with her husband.² ‘We snuggled under our blankets to watch TV and took the icy chill off the beds with hot-water bottles. Our utility bills are usually about £100 a month and recently they have gone up by almost a quarter.’

There was a parallel here with Shona Sibary. One reason why apparently affluent middle-class couples could hardly afford central heating was that Christina and her husband were determined to go on paying £12,000 a year for their son to go to independent school, as so many do. It was also true of the middle-class blogger Deborah Lane, who has been going online to explain why she was then struggling financially. This deserved closer inspection. When you have a £900,000 home in west London at your disposal, and the endless leafy suburbs of middle-class book clubs, parents’ evenings and recycling classes stretching all around, why would you worry about money? I went to see Deborah to find out.

Deborah Lane is something of a bellwether. When she wrote the words ‘I’m skint’ on her blog, tracking the peculiarities of a middle-class life in London, her readership suddenly went up from double figures to somewhere in the thousands. It wasn’t that she was looking for sympathy. It wasn’t even that she was claiming that she was particularly unusual or interesting, at least as far as her dwindling wealth was concerned. But it was written as a cry from the heart of the beleaguered middle classes, and those googlers in the ether heard her and responded.

Of course, there are people in the world far worse off than Deborah, even in the London borough of Ealing – probably even in her street. The difficulty when it comes to writing about this is that unearned privilege (which might not be worth saving) and the idea of putting education first, despite sacrifice and struggle (which might), are all inextricably confused.

‘I would say I had aspirations,’ Deborah tells me as we sip our coffee and tea next to the river in Hammersmith. Her dark glasses glint with reflected elevenses. ‘I always wanted to be married. I knew where I was going to live and how I was going to live. I wasn’t really driven by how much money I was going to earn,’ she goes on, explaining that it hasn’t really turned out like that, despite her husband’s earnings as a successful photographer.

‘I never thought we would be struggling in the way that we are, for every little thing. We do get to do some of the nice things, but not without some kind of anguish. I have to get my loyalty schemes and it goes down each time. We can no longer afford to go away. Our main summer holiday is five days in Majorca in the half-term, when the prices are lower [than in summer itself].’

Of course, a great deal of Deborah’s angst is bound up with the banking crisis and the recession that has followed. She agrees that she still leads a ‘privileged life’. But there is something about her predicament which is recognizable to the nation’s supposedly affluent classes, and exactly the same mixture of frustrated aspirations and threatened values is shared a good deal more widely. ‘Just trying to keep where we are, and downshifting a tiny bit; that’s what we’re aspiring to,’ she says. ‘I say to my kids: don’t break that because can’t afford to replace it. We’ve come off the AA. Our gas boiler is playing up and we can’t mend it because our policy still charges a £50 call-out.’

So why is she struggling to educate her two children privately? ‘Long, long ago, when we had savings and pensions, holidays and cleaners, we were in the privileged position,’ she wrote in her blog, ‘not so much to pay for our children to attend a newly founded independent primary school in the next town, as to pay for them not to attend our allocated state version in the next road.’

Once again, this is instantly recognizable. It is easy to disapprove of middle-class parents who baulk at the prospect of sending their children to the school they have been allocated, until it comes to your own children and their welfare – which explains the stressful competition for places in ‘good’ schools, especially perhaps where Deborah lives in west London.³ The allocated state school offered to put her son on the ‘gifted children’ programme just because he could spell a couple of three-letter words at the age of five, she said. It made her absolutely determined not to take up their offer, but the decision costs money. A lot of it.

She describes how she and her husband have stopped paying into a pension in the struggle to keep paying the fees in dribs and drabs. ‘They’re not even instalments; they are kind of random instalments – here’s another £800 to go in the pot. We have already spent £100,000 in school fees, and my kids are only seven and nine, and they are in the cheapest private school in this area.’

It is a huge financial commitment, and Deborah was about to get two jobs to help pay for the summer, when the children would be at home, but here she runs foul of the dilemma haunting all struggling parents. One recent part-time job offer would have paid her £18,000 for the year, but tax and holiday childcare would have gobbled up £17,000 of it.

Only 7 per cent of UK parents pay school fees (much the same as it was a generation ago, though 17 per cent of school places in London are private). The fees at secondary level are beyond all but the very highest-paid, but scholarships and other assisted places are much more available than they used to be. Yet there is something else implied in the conversation with Deborah that is important. It is the fear that this angst, the one described in terms like ‘nouveau poor’, has nothing to do with the temporary economic downturn, and that there is a fundamental shift going on – a permanent crisis that marks the slow decline of the middle classes as an identifiable segment of British life. The fear is that this marks the end, not so much of privilege, but of what the middle classes believe they stand for – education, culture, leadership. Perhaps also imagination, though that is hardly a traditional attribute of the English middle classes – but at least the ability, however un-exercised, to think for yourself.

It isn’t that somehow these values belong nowhere else, and – yes, of course – the middle classes are known for a whole range of attributes that most of us could cheerfully consign to the scrapheap. Snobbery, conformity, curtain-twitching suburban dullness, who wants those? But they also stand, traditionally, for other things which we can ill-afford to lose, and education is often at the heart of them. Not just education, but independence and learning for its own sake – and the need to sacrifice wealth and well-being to achieve it. The fear is that this generation will be the last to live the aspirational middle-class life, that the future will be an endless, heartbreaking succession of small shifts downwards towards a precarious existence, dependent on mean employers, short contracts, demanding landlords and state handouts in old age.

‘Once we move out of London, we don’t have a pension, so we will have to sell to realize some cash,’ said Deborah, thinking ahead nervously. ‘We will have to move to a much smaller property and move twice, first time so the children can go to school, and for the second time so we will have some money to use as a pension. We’re never going to be going up again – we’re just going to be going down. My financial planning at the moment revolves around getting a lottery ticket once a week.’

‘All my friends are struggling,’ she adds, and again she is not alone. Two-thirds of middle-income people in the UK are not saving for a pension. Half of them also struggle with bills every day, but the unease goes deeper than paying the bills in the middle of a global downturn.

Here is the point. The middle classes don’t like to mention it too openly, and they find it hard to articulate it even to themselves. But the truth is that they can no longer afford the life they always imagined having. It isn’t that they are greedy or want something for nothing. But they did assume, because that is what they were always told, that they would have a life like their parents and grandparents – a comfortable home, a respected professional position, good schools for their children.

They now willingly submit to a quarter of a century of mortgage discipline – in jobs that frustrate them and force them to buy in expensive childcare – just to pay hugely inflated house prices. And no matter how much they earn, there is a banker’s bonus somewhere that makes their effort look ridiculous (even in these days of slimmed-down bonuses). Worse, they seem unlikely to be able to fund their own retirement, except by the very house-price inflation that will exclude their children from the housing market.

It wasn’t supposed to be like that. Their middle-class parents and grandparents lived respected lives as local doctors, lawyers and as a range of other professionals and managers. Now many of those positions have disappeared outside London, except as unionized supplicants to central government largesse. As a by-product of their own political success, they have also backed the creation of a new privileged class of Übermenschen in the financial sector, who inflate the prices for everyone else – and whose salaries and bonuses make a mockery of the values they were brought up with.

So here is the dilemma for the English middle classes. They are like the proverbial frog in a frying pan, unable to make a leap into the unknown to escape being fried – but knowing it was also them who turned on the stove in the first place. They hate complaining, certainly about losing privileges. But the middle classes believed themselves to be the respectable backbone of a respectable, successful nation. Brought up to stand for something beyond money, they have found their values eroded, misunderstanding the difference between making money and creating wealth. They have colluded in a new dispensation which assumes that shopping is the highest aspiration and which undermines their independence as professionals.

‘The middle class, as we knew it, is not long for this world,’ wrote the journalist William Leith in the Daily Telegraph, hitting the nail on the head.⁴ Leith described the moment the penny dropped for one man when he was looking for a job. ‘Everything’s changed,’ he said. ‘Now you have to be talented, or make people think you’re talented. Being qualified counts for nothing. I mean, these days, everybody’s got a degree.’

Then he described the middle-class credo:

People could be teachers, or civil servants – not rapacious capitalists, but ordinary, quiet, middle-class people – and still live in detached houses, and buy new cars, and go on holiday to the south of France. And they had decent pensions to look forward to afterwards. That was what being middle class was all about. You passed your exams. You got a job. You stayed out of trouble. In return, you felt safe. And now, it looks like all of that is slipping away. And who knows, soon it might be gone for good.

That description feels right. It is the sheer lack of ambition that used to be such a feature of middle-class life that this captures, and it does indeed feel like it is slipping away. Increasingly, the middle classes are finding that they can’t afford it, even when they are earning twice the average income. Why should that be? What went wrong? The answers are in some ways the same as the ones given by Deep Throat in an underground car park during the Watergate affair. The key lies in following the money.

‘I feel like I’m stuck, like I can’t breathe, like I’m in quicksand,’ said Brooklyn Davis, unemployed in Pittsburgh, about his financial plight.⁵ Davis was not middle-class, even in the USA, but it is strange, once you start researching the current plight of the middle classes, how this word ‘stuck’ keeps coming up over and over again.

‘We are stuck,’ one human resources manager told the Guardian newspaper in 2011. ‘At the end of the month, what with rent and extortionate costs of travel, we have nothing left. In fact, less than nothing, which is a bit of a shocker.’⁶ Shona Sibary used the same word describing the plight of her family when they had their home repossessed. As Deborah Lane implied, this feeling of being ‘stuck’ emerged before the banking crisis and the downturn. When the Department of Work and Pensions began investigating the so-called ‘squeezed middle’ in 2006, it found that – even then – a quarter of middle-income earners could not afford a week’s family holiday. Six per cent of them couldn’t afford to send children swimming once a month. According to the TUC, the same proportion of middle-income people were worried about their jobs as were the very lowest earners. Not all of them paying school fees by any means.

Even by the middle of the last decade – years before the financial crisis – the number of middle-class families earning more than £30,000 who were looking for debt advice had tripled.⁷ These were the boom years. It had nothing to do with the global downturn.

When the Bath University professor Guy Standing coined the phrase ‘the Precariat’ in 2011, to describe those on low to middle incomes that exist in a precarious succession of short-term contracts, my impression is that it wasn’t intended to include the traditional middle class (he calls them the ‘salariat’).⁸ But in fact the same precarious existence, struggling with the costs of a respectable, civilized life, while the generous Victorian provision of parks and libraries shrinks before their eyes, is affecting the middle classes too. Perhaps not so corrosively, but as a terrifying future prospect that they can see...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1. The scene of the crime
• 2. The first clue: the staggering house-price escalator
• 3. The second clue: the strange case of the disappearing banks
• 4. The third clue: the corrosive explosion of finance
• 5. The fourth clue: the dog that didn’t bark
• 6. The fifth clue: the great education panic
• 7. The sixth clue: the strange case of the disappearing professionals
• 8. Following the clues, unmasking the villains
• Afterword to the Paperback Edition – The Year Everything Changed: 2013
• Keep Reading
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• About the Publisher