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.’53 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.54
The terrible truth is that the key to this health and independence is education, that the opportunities and advantages it can give are more and more scarce and competitive, and that they require investment in bricks and mortar.
Christopher Stockwell used a trust fund set up years before the Lloyd’s Scandal broke, which he had intended for his children, to buy another house. He also managed to claw back some of his businesses, but he says it has taken him two decades. He says that making the house habitable, and creating a garden in the field next door, was what kept him sane during the desperate years. When I met him there, the whole story was finally coming to its end in the European courts. The legacy of the scandal that engulfed Lloyd’s of London is that there are now only a few hundred Names left. Their place has been taken by institutional investors who are better able to look after themselves.
It was Stockwell who suggested the parallel with events around the 2008 banking collapse. I had previously seen no further than the ‘lie’ of unlimited liability and its terrible human consequences. But there are other parallels with the moment when the financial system tottered.
For one thing, the whole weight of government action was thrown behind preserving the status quo, at all costs. We have come to believe that governments govern on behalf of the middle classes. That clearly isn’t so any more. In their terror that the whole system would unravel, Western governments outdid themselves in their desperation to protect the guilty. The Lloyd’s Scandal showed that they would, and if the middle classes must suffer to preserve the system, they were a necessary sacrifice.
The scandal showed something else as well. If willing and naive investors were required to fill the yawning financial gap that threatened the Lloyd’s insurance market, then they would be recruited. Like First World War generals, they herded the little investors over the top – into the path of the machine guns.
Ever since they discovered political economy in the 1820s, the English middle classes have felt secure in their financial knowledge. They might not have enough money – yet – but they trusted the system that would allow them to invest it safely and sensibly. The problem at the root of their serious decline, and present crisis, is that something has happened, decisions have been taken over the past generation, that have turned that position upside down.
We now have to find out how and why.
Middle Classes in Figures
Percentage of UK population declaring themselves to be middle-class: 43 per cent (though other surveys have taken this up to 70 per cent).55
The New Middle-Class-Values Dictionary
INDEPENDENCE: Perhaps the old middle classes valued independence too, as long as people used it to reach the correct conclusions. Not so now: the middle classes believe passionately in their own independence and admire it in other people. In fact, the desire for independence is now central to the middle classes; not necessarily independence from employers, but from landlords and tyrannical bosses, and the long, desperate uphill struggle towards financial independence. It leads them to invest terrifyingly in property just as it leads others to disinvest and downshift. They also admire independence of mind – in moderation, of course …
Dispatches from the Frontline
Brown & Green café, Crystal Palace station, Friday 10.30 a.m.
Gipsy Kings waft out of the digital player behind the counter, over the luxurious sound of sizzling bacon. This is an English scene, with all the luxury of a late breakfast when everyone else is at work, but with a Latin American edge.
The middle-class newcomers to Crystal Palace, high on the hill above south London, are generally pretty oblivious to the culture
