Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes?

Here is a letter written to the Daily News just after the First World War, which might have come from Patrick Hutber’s files:

My wife goes ‘sticking’. That saves the expenses of firewood, our holidays are generally imaginary. That saves too. My wife gets bargains at remnant sales, and rhubarb from the garden does yeoman service. Also my wife murders her eyes with sewing sewing, sewing. Saving is out of the question.

The truth is that the middle classes have always felt beleaguered, and perhaps that isn’t surprising, since they are almost by definition putting their money away for a rainy day, a home or the children’s education. They are bound to be fearful of the future. Angus Maude and Roy Lewis talked about the middle classes always approaching the future with a mixture of ‘dread and confidence’. What is different now?

Perhaps they were always indebted. Perhaps there have been periods when the middle classes exhausted themselves and their children with the desperate struggle for school places – though I’m not sure of that. Perhaps previous generations doubted that their children could lead a middle-class life. I don’t know. But there is something different now. It is that, as we shall see and without their noticing, the very engines of thrift – the savings and financial sector – have turned against the middle classes and are actively funnelling their wealth out of their reach. They have disguised their fears of the future from themselves with ever greater debts, and their education, cars and holidays – core features of a middle-class life – are more often now funded by increasingly big loans.

There is no doubt that the English middle classes have an extraordinary gift for absorbtion and reinvention. Over the centuries they have integrated Roman Catholics, Jews, Nonconformists and a whole range of other domestic and immigrant groups, and are still doing so today. On the other hand, if the middle classes were really dedicated primarily to thrift – an idea that seems to have been banished by the credit card – you might reasonably wonder whether they still exist at all. In my own generation, in a period of rising prices, those who have done better financially are those who borrowed the most. Whatever that amounts to, it isn’t thrift.

Which brings us to the other objection. Maybe there is no longer any such thing as ‘the middle classes’ anyway. Maybe they have long since been subsumed – along with the working classes – into a large lump of Middle England, with our two children each, our front gardens paved, our wii machines churning out the detritus from American and Japanese culture.

Struggling with this same question in 1949, Angus Maude and Roy Lewis suggested, tongues slightly in their cheeks, that the difference between the middle classes and the rest was that they used napkin rings – on the grounds that the working classes never used them and the upper classes used a clean napkin at every meal.

It is one definition. I have to admit that, although there may be napkins somewhere in my own house, there is nothing remotely like a napkin ring (though my parents use them). But don’t let’s dismiss this too quickly. This is one of the respondents to a modern version of the wartime survey Mass Observation talking about class in 1990:

I was ill at ease … when invited to the home of a girlfriend who lived in a wealthy quarter of Wolverhampton. I was there for lunch, and while I was quietly confident my table manners would stand scrutiny, I was disconcerted to find a linen table napkin rolled in an ivory ring on my side plate. It was my first encounter with a napkin and while I knew it should be laid on the lap and not tucked into the shirt collar I could not think what to do with it when the meal was finished. It worried me greatly and finally I laid it nonchalantly on my plate in a crumpled heap …

This was quoted in a study by one of the leading sociologists of class in the UK, Professor Mike Savage of York University, comparing how people talked about class then and in the 1940s, in the original Mass Observation surveys. His conclusion was that class is now not so much a designation as a starting point in a long story about your identity. You can try the experiment yourself. Ask someone what class they come from, preferably someone you know well to avoid a clash, and after some agonies – there is still a huge reluctance among the middle classes about declaring themselves as such – they will tell you the story of their life. Researching this book, I found that to be true over and over again.

Despite people’s reluctance to say they are middle-class, the Future Foundation’s Middle Britain report in 2006 found that 43 per cent identified themselves as middle-class. Another survey concluded that about a quarter of the population were middle-class but preferred not to say so. It is hard to find a lucid definition these days, certainly when we get beyond the napkins. You can’t do it in the way people used to.

White collar versus blue collar? Most of our traditional working-class jobs have long since been outsourced to China or India.

Salary versus wage packet? Who gets a wage packet these days?

Homeowner versus renter? Three-quarters of trade unionists now own their own homes.

Even earnings just confuse the issue. One recent study found that 48 per cent of those calling themselves ‘working-class’ earned more than the average salary and a quarter of them earned more than £50,000 a year. In some cities (Leeds for example) people calling themselves working-class are better off than those who see themselves as middle-class.

A third of bank managers in one recent survey identified themselves as working-class.

To confuse things further, those calling themselves ‘upper-class’ seem to have disappeared altogether.

My own sense, having talked to lots of people while I was writing this, is that there are now many different kinds of middle classes. Sociologists talk about the different wings of the middle class – the conservative and radical wings, the consumerist and the avant-garde middle classes, not to mention the managers and the intellectuals. There is even the London middle class, a different animal again. But it is even more complicated than that. Twenty-first-century middle classes might also include any of these:

The Old Middle Classes These are the old gentry, still the backbone of the community, often with a forces background. They remain understated, modest, and you can tell them immediately because their kitchen units and labour-saving machinery seem to date back decades before anybody else’s – they are immune to marketing – and because they keep their regimental photos, and former ships tossing on the high seas, hung firmly in the downstairs loo (a middle-class word, if ever there was one). The pictures are then prominent enough to inform visitors, but not so much as to imply that life stopped dead when their owners became civilians. Caricatures of the English, they hanker successfully for the countryside.

The Designers These are the London middle classes, and as different from the old middle classes as it is possible to be. They are streetwise (or so they believe), sophisticated, early adopters of technology, and have kitchens done out entirely in matt black. They sneer slightly at provincial life, but they keep their eyes glued to the value of their homes, aware that it is also their escape route to a less stressful life, outside the metropolis, where they no longer have to renew their resident’s parking permits and can abandon the agony of finding acceptable schools for their invariably talented offspring.

The Creatives Look at most newspaper journalists and writers (this doesn’t apply to TV journalists for some reason). Their hair uncombed, their clothes unironed (I speak partly of myself of course), they are not obviously members of the middle classes as we might have understood it in the 1960s, and they often roam widely in and around the class system. They exist as a group because of the huge success of UK export earnings in the creative market, from Shakespeare to Comic Relief via the advertising and film industries, among the biggest export earners for the UK economy. There is an inverted snobbery lurking here that explains why so few films are made about middle-class life. Yet the Creatives are highly educated and are clearly part of the increasingly exotic creature known as the middle class.

The Omnivores This was an aspect of the class system identified by the sociologist Tony Bennett, and it explains some of the hesitancy when you ask people about class these days.

These are the people who tasted working-class club culture in their youth, and middle-class classical concert culture in their middle age, and have an eclectic music collection of musicals, country and western and drum and bass. They enjoyed working-class drinking holes in their student days, and posh gastropubs in their affluent middle age. They move quite freely across the class system, but are not quite at home anywhere. Most of us these days are omnivores, to some extent, but some of us get stuck there, half in, half out, uneasy with middle-class values yet clinging to them at the same time, our accents uncategorizable and varying with company.

The Multis I live in south London, the capital city of Multi culture. The first two couples we met through the children’s school were a German missionary married to a Ghanaian doctor and a Swedish-speaking Finnish artist married to an Algerian chef. This section of the new middle classes covers those people who live in the UK but were born elsewhere and who find our class nomenclature utterly baffling. Equally, these are often mixed-race couples who have chosen to live in the UK because it is relatively tolerant – and because they met somewhere in the UK melting pot, and the thought of going back to the Middle East or to northern Europe, and dealing with the disapproval there, was too exhausting to entertain. South London is, despite everything, a huge success story in multiracial, multicultural living. It isn’t traditionally middle-class, but that is the way it is going.

The Public Servants They don’t fit the caricature either, but all those frontline professionals – local government managers, charity executives, nurses, teachers, trading standards officers and all the rest – are plainly a large niche in the middle classes, perhaps usually overlooked because they might vote Labour, Liberal Democrat or Green before Conservative. They are less squeezed financially, though their pensions are not quite what they were, but they have been squeezed in other ways – their responsibilities and dignity eroded by the blizzard of targets, standards, guidelines and directives. Also included are the university lecturers, squeezed in their own way by the Research Assessment Exercise which forces them to publish like crazy to prove their worth. And the new charity and social enterprise managers who deliver so many aspects of public services, perhaps more enslaved by targets than all the rest put together.

The Crunchies These are the British equivalent of the American ‘cultural creatives’, doyens of what used to be called the ‘inner-directed’ approach to life.

They are people who are no longer interested in keeping up with the Joneses over their material possessions, but are overwhelmingly motivated by health, independence and education. They vote across the political spectrum, but they are concerned about the environment, join Friends of the Earth, sign petitions, have food allergies and have often managed to downshift – deliberately earning less for a better lifestyle, increasingly outside London. It is thanks to the Crunchies that the fastest-growing areas in the UK over the past generation have been the Muesli Belt (a term coined by Martin Stott), the counties that circle London beyond the Home Counties, in a huge circle from Dorset to Norfolk.

Mike Savage and his colleagues are conducting a widespread survey through the BBC about modern class, and he and his colleagues normally now determine class in rather different terms, dividing people according to what aspects of culture they enjoy, into professional classes (hardly ever watch TV), the intermediate class (which would be the professional class except that it shares a much lower life expectancy with the working classes), and the working class (watches four times as much TV as the professional class, but never goes to musicals).

This nomenclature slightly muddies the water, because 29 per cent of all three classes still go to the pub once a week. It also omits the emergence of the new class, the international One Per Cent that is hoovering up the money from the middle classes (I am self-employed, which should make me officially ‘intermediate class’).

Then the house prices began to rise, until the point where that keynote of middle-class life – the partner at home doing the housework – became unaffordable, just when housewifing became unacceptable to many women. But through each twist of policy, they adapted.

In short, the middle classes cling on. Reports of their demise are premature and, although the blow may not have been fatal yet, we still need to search for the weapon used to fell them. They cling on also in a variety of forms and versions, highly eclectic and quite impossible to define. The middle classes are like elephants: you know one when you see one.

The key question is whether there is anything any more which holds these disparate identities together. Patrick Hutber’s thrift may have disappeared. Even the sense of deferred gratification which used to define the middle classes is not quite as secure as it was.

The famous experiment by Walter Mischel in the 1960s offered four-year-olds one marshmallow now or two in twenty minutes and found that those who waited went on to enormously outperform the others in the US scholastic aptitude tests. For a moment this seemed to be a justification for all those middle-class efforts at saving for education, a way to glimpse the essence of middle-class life actually there under the microscope. But the revelation that those who are not able to resist the instant marshmallow are often children of single parents, where the father is absent, rather undermined it as a middle-class definition. It isn’t that the instant marshmallow children are psychologically different; they are just more worried about the future. They have learned to grab their chance while they have it.

Even so, there is still something here about a distinctive middle-class approach to thinking ahead and their obsession with education – not always as an ideal but as a way of defining themselves against the other. So many people I talked to about this book began their replies to me: ‘I don’t want to sound snobbish, but …’ As if the very act of defining themselves as middle-class was somehow aggressive and disapproving. As if the heart of middle-class identity, even now, stems from a fear of fecklessness, disorder and ignorance. No wonder people sound apologetic, and no wonder the middle classes feel so embattled – defending themselves against the encroaching tide at the same time as battling with each other for the scarce resource, the edge in education.

‘The middle class family has become both citadel and hothouse,’ wrote Professor Cindi Katz, describing the American documentary Race to Nowhere by the San Francisco lawyer and mother-of-three Vicki Abeles, inspired by the suicide of a local teenager and describing the panic attacks of middle-class children pushed beyond the limit by their competitive parents. She describes the American middle classes ‘cultivating perfectly commodified children for niche marketing in a future that feels increasingly precarious’.

Cindi Katz urges an ‘unplugging’ to rescue children for a proper childhood, but she doesn’t see how. ‘It seems almost impossible to unplug while others are plugging away (taking advanced placement classes, studying in high achievement school tracks, attending sports clinics, and the prize is university admission).’

This desperate panic is part of the same ‘squeeze’ phenomenon. It is considerably less intense than it is in the USA, but it is happening in the UK too. We have all seen the poor middle-class battery hens in their uniforms, weighed down by satchels of homework and the cares of the world.

Perhaps this begins to explain the embarrassment about claiming middle-class status, the implied disapproval – the failure to celebrate its best values, the inverted snobbery directed at suburban values in so much British culture, even the ad breaks. ‘Never has a section of society so enthusiastically co-operated in its own euthanasia,’ wrote Patrick Hutber back in 1976.

Still so today, perhaps even more so.

I don’t quite understand this. It is true that the English middle classes can demonstrate a debilitating snobbery and a boneheaded dullness – their failure to understand the changing world about them is at the heart of their current problems. But they also represent enduring values from generation to generation, which I inherited from my parents and grandparents and am proud to have done – about learning and tolerance, a determination to make things happen, about courage and leadership and, yes, even creativity. I have a feeling this double-headed set of values goes to the heart of the problem, as the middle classes maintain their principles in the face of constant self-criticism, in case they are espousing the wrong ones. Are they approving of scholarship or criticizing people who refuse to learn?

The problem is that saying that they are middle-class seems to be admitting to a whole shedload of prejudices, snobberies and pursed-lipped disapprovals. Some of this is clearly caricatured – most middle-class people these days are among the most tolerant people in the world, not just in the UK – but some of it is undoubtedly real. The middle classes may be unfailingly polite in public, but there is definitely an undercurrent of grouchiness, which might explain the apology. It is the impression they give themselves that they are somehow the thin red line that prevents the nation being overwhelmed by fecklessness, brutishness or a branded nightmare of violent computer games, dominated by Tesco, McDonald’s or Virgin.

I have to be honest about myself here. I have looked unflinchingly in the mirror and it is true: I also harbour this quite unjustified disapproval. Of how people dress, how they shop, how they spit on the pavement or scream at their children. So, if there has to be a hint of an apology about being middle-class it is because of this fear at the heart of it, that we all know about but do not articulate – that drives us in our financial decisions, or our choice of schools and places to live, in what we buy, how we dress and how we behave.

But let’s not go overboard here. Even those who apologized to me about sounding middle-class are among the most open-minded people I know. There is an extraordinary inverted snobbery in British culture about this, which is far tougher on the fantasies of the middle classes than on anyone else, and it has turned the middle classes in on themselves. It is hard to see any portrayal of middle-class families on TV in the UK where there is no hideous secret under the carpet or in the closet. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a happy middle-class family portrayed on Casualty without it turning out that the father is a child molester or the mother a secret addict (though sometimes it is the other way around).

None of this suggests that the pursed lips are justified, or that other classes are any less loving. You only have to watch the mixture of classes and races struggling to teach their children to swim in my local swimming pool on Saturday mornings to realize that. I certainly don’t suggest that there are no neglectful middle-class parents either. It is all very sensitive.

It may always have been a bit like this. When the English middle classes emerged as we might recognize them now, in the 1820s, it was a process driven by geography. The middle classes were those who were geographically separated from their workplace. But they had also discovered the joys of political economy and took it up with a moral fervour. ‘Political economy’, said the Reverend Thomas Chalmers, the great Victorian exponent of charity, ‘is but one grand exemplification of the alliance, which the God of righteousness hath established, between prudence and moral principle on the one hand, and physical comfort on the other.’

There it is again – that same duality: values, but bound up with unforgivable smugness.

For those early middle classes, the way that money worked, and its apparent moral behaviour – rewarding hard work – brought economics almost to the level of religious truth. It drove the boom in self-help and self-education and it carved out both the drive and the fears of the middle classes in the future. It made the great middle-class ideal – what the sociologist Ray Pahl called ‘the dogs bounding round the lawn, the children with their ponies, a gentle balanced life’ – seem almost a moral one. The more embattled that ideal becomes, and the more embarrassed they are about it, the more the middle classes seem to cling to it.

Behind all the clichés, this is in many ways the life so many people want – independent, peaceful, leisured, safe, where they can create the home and the life around them, stay healthy, and pass some of those values of imagination and independence on to their children. It is precisely this ideal, and the best values that lie behind it, that is now in danger.

The thrift has gone. I no longer go into my friends’ houses and find that their fridge or stove is older than I am, and sometimes older than their parents. But the Crunchies give a bit of a clue. The middle classes, whoever they are, are absolutely committed to health, independence and education and whatever will promote it, even if they interpret the path to that ideal – working harder or working less – in very different ways.

It still requires sacrifice, saving and planning ahead. It still means deferred gratification. It still means the middle classes turn out independent-minded, intelligent children quite capable of understanding the world, even if sometimes they don’t. But it also explains that embattled sense that goes beyond economics. This is a cultural struggle for survival as well as an economic one. As Paul Ray said about the American ‘cultural creatives’: they demand authenticity, but they tend to believe their tastes and beliefs are shared by themselves and a few friends – and beyond that, the wasteland.