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Broke
Who Killed the Middle Classes?
DAVID BOYLE
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate 2013
Copyright © David Boyle 2013, 2014
David Boyle asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image © Shutterstock
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Source ISBN: 9780007491056
Ebook Edition © April 2013 ISBN: 9780007491049
Version: 2017-10-31
For William
Contents
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
‘By the people, I mean the middle classes, the wealth and intelligence of the country, the glory of the British name.’
Henry, Lord Brougham, 1831
I was born in a corner of central London that wraps itself around a great grey-green greasy stretch of water called the Regent’s Canal. It was and is known as Little Venice.
As anyone familiar with Little Venice will know, this defines me inescapably as middle-class. Not just slightly middle-class, but staggeringly, swelteringly, stratospherically middle-class, as middle as you can get. And not just by the broad American definition (average income) either, but by the specific British definitions which are harder to pin down, but which seem to be about attitudes and upbringing, culture and prejudices.
But there are many kinds of middle class, even in the UK, and I hope this book will strike a chord with all of them. From the first-generation middle classes who followed the entrepreneurial path set out by Margaret Thatcher right through to the crustiest scion of the landed gentry. From the brand-new estate outside Bishop’s Stortford to the tumbledown off-grid eco-cottage outside Totnes. I mention Little Venice because anyone reading this book deserves to know about the niche in the class system I am writing from, but I am only too aware that there is more than one way of being middle-class.
In my case, I am also middle-class because my parents are. Both my grandfathers were in the services, one rising to be a colonel in the army and the other to be a captain in the navy. Their service pensions and various modest pots of inherited money and property gave them relatively comfortable retirements. I owe my grandparents a great
