Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes?

Neither set of grandparents approved very much when my newly married parents moved into a run-down rented flat in Little Venice, which was not in those days quite what it has become. The canal stank of drowned cats, and was divided from the road by a tall brick wall, like a scene from Love on the Dole. All those coloured barges sheltering artists and musicians (and later Richard Branson) were still a decade away.

The flat was in the least respectable half of Randolph Avenue, bending down towards the canal, with peeling white stucco columns and flaking black front doors which looked like the portals of some medieval fortress. But the family disapproval also touched the street’s reputation. Only ten years before, this end of the thoroughfare had sported the name ‘Portland Road’, which had been such a notorious red-light district that the council decided to change it.

Downstairs from our flat was a fearsome Alf Garnett figure, string-vested and with a fluent and foul-mouthed command of the language, who would hammer on the ceiling at the slightest provocation. My uncle had a heavier tread than most (submariners tend to be larger than the rest of us), and he could set off the hammering and oaths just by walking across the room.

We moved closer to the canal, to another rented flat, when I was only about three, and we left Randolph Avenue behind. I never lived there again, though I have wandered down the street many times, and watched the slow transformation of the red-light district, first into respectability, and then into luxury. I ran into a couple at a dinner party a few years ago who lived in a tiny flat at the very top of the very building where I started out. They told me that our flat – which had so shocked my grandparents’ families – was now inhabited by the head of Benetton Europe. It had become, through the strange metamorphosis of gentrification, a fitting home for the new class of ultra-rich.

I tell this story to show how, during my lifetime – even my adult lifetime – my contemporaries and I have witnessed an extraordinary revolution in the fortunes of the middle classes, from the widespread doubts in the mid-1970s whether they could survive at all, through to their recent apotheosis under Margaret Thatcher a decade later. It was a revolution that began with DIY and was carried forward – leaping and out of control – into staggering house-price inflation, as previously careful and respectable middle-class investors began to cream off the rewards of the next property bubble. Public policy, under all the prime ministers during that period, has been intended, if often quite wrong-headedly, to promote the middle-class life ever since.

So here is the question at the heart of this book. Given that extraordinary shift in fortunes – and that cascade of money through property and financial services known as Big Bang – why is it that the middle classes feel so threatened? Why have they been sidelined by a new and aggressive international class of mega-rich? Why have their homes and way of life and retirements become virtually unaffordable, with home ownership falling steadily, and now lower than in Romania and Bulgaria? Why are they in such a panic about their children’s education? Why has their professional judgement been shunned? And why have they allowed their hard-working duty to career, family and salary to be so futile – given that, however successful they become, there is a banker half their age whose bonus makes them look ridiculous? In short, why are we wondering again whether the distinctive lifestyles of the English middle classes can survive?

Those are the questions I have set out to answer, and finding the solution is a kind of detective story. There were the middle classes – successful, privileged. What flung them into such desperate straits? What were the crucial moments that were to spell disaster, the decisions that went so terribly wrong? Who was responsible?

It is next to impossible to pin down the first cause for this intense crisis, because you can happily follow the strands back generations to find it, perhaps even to the beginnings of the modern middle classes in the 1820s. So I have followed the recent clues as best I can, and pinpointed six critical moments of decision – six moments, all within recent history, when disaster could perhaps have been averted. This is a whodunnit, after all. There are clues and suspects and red herrings. There are motives to be weighed and witnesses to be questioned. By the end, I hope we can begin to agree who struck the fatal blow, and work out whether the victim has any hope of rebirth – and, if so, how.

But before we set out with our deerstalkers and magnifying glasses, there is just a little more I need to say about myself. Because this can never be an objective study, and I don’t want to claim that it is. As in the best detective stories, the narrator of this one is involved in the action. I am complicit because I am middle-class myself. I live in a small detached home with a lawn. I have an allotment. I shop at Waitrose, at least when I can afford it. I buy olive oil and have bizarre food allergies. Any detective needs to know how far they can trust the evidence I bring.

There is also something peculiar going on when people talk about the middle classes. In the course of writing this book I carried out a huge number of conversations with friends and acquaintances, and some people I had never met before, about being middle-class. Many of them would ‘admit’ to it, ‘confess’ to it, or even apologize at the outset. Yes, they would say, I am middle-class – ‘I’m afraid’, as if they were confessing to alcoholism. It happened so often that I came to expect it.

In the course of writing the book, I thought a great deal about this. I don’t believe it is anything new. A generation ago, when the financial journalist Patrick Hutber wrote his book The Decline and Fall of the Middle Class, he said that no class in history had been quite so complicit in its own demise. So I have been asking myself this question too: why do we have to apologize? It isn’t a rhetorical question but a genuine one, and it seems to me that there are three reasons.

The first is that the term ‘middle-class’ sounds like ‘middle-aged’ or ‘middlebrow’. It sounds miserably ordinary, and there is a vague implication of smugness about it – as if we don’t care how ordinary we are. I think we can discard this one: many of the best artists, sportspeople, scientists, writers, teachers and leaders have been middle-class. It is just silly to write the lot of us off as ‘suburban’, as if sub-urban meant that we were somehow sub-human. I reject the charge.

The second reason is that saying ‘I am middle-class’ may seem somehow to embrace all the disapproval and prejudice peddled by middle-class people in all generations. That may be so, and I will return to this later in the book.

The third reason also has some merit. It is the implication that, when we say we are middle-class, we are admitting that we are privileged. It is the same for me. I am a self-employed writer so I am hardly wealthy (I am probably the only person to conduct an independent review for the government on tax credits). But I went to independent school in Bristol, in the days when we still called them ‘public schools’, and was constantly told that I was privileged – without being told what that might imply. Yet this only matters if we are exclusively self-interested as well as privileged. By writing about the plight of the middle classes, I am not implying that nobody else is suffering – quite the reverse. I don’t want the middle classes to survive at the expense of anyone else, but I do want them to survive.

Even so, this book is bound to be dismissed by some people as special pleading by the privileged, and it is true that the middle classes have the huge advantages of capital, inheritance, confidence and political influence. Yet none of those privileges look like providing their next generation with a roof over their heads. I am certainly not suggesting that the plight of the middle classes is anything like the plight of the working classes. If middle-class professionals have suffered from new, narrow forms of efficiency, then the working classes are oppressed all the more by the same forces, timed and regimented, targeted and manipulated, often for a miserable pittance that still keeps them dependent on the state. If the middle-class jobs have been disappearing – and they have – working-class jobs have all but disappeared.

What this amounts to is that I don’t apologize for writing about the middle classes or for being middle-class. I am not denying that anybody else is in trouble. I am certainly not saying that the middle classes are sinless, or wholly innocent of their own demise. But I make no apology for defending them, or assuming that they are worth defending, because – despite the disapproval and the reserve – I believe there is something about middle-class life in the UK that is worth preserving. Not the privilege, not the snobbery, but the right of everyone to live the kind of independent life that I was brought up with and which I struggle to provide for my own family.

So yes, I am middle-class, ‘I’m afraid’ – but I’m not really ashamed of it. Because somewhere in this whodunnit are the clues that might prevent us all from sinking into a new proletarian semi-slavery. So in the best traditions of Miss Marple, the most middle-class detective of them all, bring your knitting and your notebook and help me piece together the evidence.

1 (#ulink_562968d4-2f3c-58e1-9602-d6fb38c91eaf)

The scene of the crime (#ulink_562968d4-2f3c-58e1-9602-d6fb38c91eaf)

‘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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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: