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
