the need to protect the Lloyd’s market so that it could get back on its feet. But nevertheless, allowing the establishment to cover up was what made the banking crisis possible.’
Here is the conundrum of the story, and the paradox for the middle classes today. They believe the great financial institutions are on their side, believe they understand the way the world works, pride themselves even on their ability to navigate through it – they had welcomed the deregulation of financial services and all the other changes since the 1980s. But they have been horribly deluded.
The truth is that the world has changed, and the middle classes failed to see it. Their sturdy English conservatism has not served them well in this respect, because the financial sector is not on their side at all, and has not been for some time, and for reasons that go way beyond the shenanigans at Lloyd’s. Through no one’s fault and no one’s conspiracy, their collective failure to see the world clearly has made them vulnerable – so vulnerable that their survival as a recognizable class is now in doubt.
There are two big objections to the thesis I have set out here, and we need to look at them now. Doing so will also force us, and not before time, to look at the other big question: who are the middle classes these days anyway?
There have always been middle classes, right back to ancient times. They were the professionals, the shopkeepers, the tax-collectors and all the rest of the population between the peasants and the aristocracy. There they were in Britain too, through the centuries, running the pubs, owning property, riding to hounds. But the great influx into the middle classes coincided with the development of the railways, so that – for the first time – they could move away from their place of work. They no longer needed to live over the shop. These were not so much gentry as commuters, setting up home in the suburbs, and their emergence coincided with a new kind of middle-class society, dedicated to independence from the tyranny of bosses and landlords. From Mr Pooter to Captain Mainwaring, they thrived well into the twentieth century, but not smoothly or universally. There was always the chance, as they were well aware, of a politician determined to squeeze them until the pips squeaked.
Perhaps the biggest shift came after the war when, thanks to the 1944 Education Act, the upper middle classes began to shift from the grammar schools to fee-paying independent schools, until the prices shot up out of reach at secondary level – while the new middle classes filled their places.
The first objection to the idea that the middle classes are disappearing is that, for as long as they have existed – and even Aristotle warned that it was important that they survived for the good of the state – there have been warnings or bleatings from inside them that their days were numbered. This is a collective peril for anyone who writes about the death of the middle classes. In fact, there have been so many predictions of their demise, all of them premature, that it is hard to imagine them expiring at all – despite everything I have set out so far.
The Marxist critic and novelist Raymond Williams famously talked about an ‘escalator’ that took every generation back nostalgically to a golden age a few generations before.31 The same phenomenon seems to work the other way around for the struggling middle classes. For more than three decades I have until now left unread on my bookshelf a book by Patrick Hutber, one of the cheerleaders for Margaret Thatcher, called The Decline and Fall of the Middle Class.32 This was at least subtitled ‘How it can fight back’, which did imply some hope.
The 1970s were certainly a tough period, especially for anyone practising ‘thrift’, which Hutber called the defining characteristic of the middle classes. For Hutber, the middle classes were the ‘saving classes’, which was difficult for them when inflation was then only just down from 25 per cent and the top rate of income tax stood at 83 per cent. He put a note in his Sunday Telegraph column asking for people to write to him, and was deluged with accounts of the mid-century middle-class life.
One correspondent described himself as ‘up against the wall’. ‘I haven’t seen a play in London in two years. I only eat in restaurants on business. I can’t afford the gardener once a week any more. You start adding it up and it amounts to a social revolution.’33 ‘It is my belief that, the way things are going, the middle classes are doomed to a gradual extinction over the course of the next generation or two,’ said another. ‘We are mainly living like the camel in the desert does on the fat stored in its hump.’34 Another reply added, in typical middle-class self-deprecating style: ‘I hope to receive the “final call” before the roof falls in.’35
Even the great egalitarian playwright J. B. Priestley was worried. ‘The full effect in our culture, largely based on the middle class, has not been felt yet, but many of us are feeling gloomy about our prospects.’ Who would have thought it: the Sage of Working-Class Bradford brought down to such a level of pessimism?36 In 1974, the prominent Conservative MP John Gorst set up the Middle Class Association (he sent out a mailshot to people he knew might be interested, but the two or three replies he received back all said that, although they were interested, unfortunately they were upper-class).37 It was taken over by a small right-wing group who kicked him out, renamed it and allowed it to collapse the following year. The middle classes are not good at political movements at the best of times.
You might think, given Hutber’s fears, that the middle classes had never felt quite so embattled. Yet go back on the escalator another generation and you find a fascinating 1949 book by the future playwright and Washington editor of The Economist Roy Lewis and the future Conservative cabinet minister Angus Maude, father of the current Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude.38 Like Hutber, they were writing at the end of a period of Labour government, in the austerity years, immediately after the abolition of most fee-paying in primary schools and grammar schools.
‘We thought of calling it “The Decline and Fall of the Middle Class”,’ they wrote, ‘but they are kicking so hard they must still be alive.’39
Again, you might think that the late 1940s were a unique moment of fear and anxiety for the middle classes, because of uniquely high taxation and government on behalf of another class. Not a bit of it. Travel back on the time conveyor belt another generation and there was the Daily Mail castigating David Lloyd George’s People’s Budget, the one that introduced old-age pensions, under the headline ‘Plundering the middle classes’. Three years before had seen the launch of the Middle Class Defence Organisation which ran candidates in the London County Council elections and eventually became the Middle Class Union. This was a branch of Middle Class International, though the existence of such an organization does make the mind boggle a little.
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.40
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
