Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes?
If you thought being middle-class meant your own home, something set aside for the kids and a comfortable retirement – think again.For the first time ever, today’s middle classes will struggle to enjoy the same privileges of security and comfort that their grandparents did. How did this situation come about? What can be done about it?In this beautifully shaped inquiry, David Boyle questions why the middle classes are diminishing and how their status, independence and values are being eroded. From Thatcher’s boost of the mortgage market to Blair and Brown’s posturing over public services, ‘Broke’ examines the key moments in recent history that created ‘the squeezed middle’.Can the middle classes be revived? Should they be? Although they were not innocent in their downfall, Boyle argues that a newly galvanised middle class could be the key to future economic stability. The middle class may be broke, but it is not beyond repair.
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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 deal for their resources of love and care, but also perhaps for placing me so unambiguously in such a recognizable spot in the class system.
Neither set of grandparents approved very much when my newly married parents moved into a run-down rented flat in Little Venice, which was not in those days quite what it has become. The canal stank of drowned cats, and was divided from the road by a tall brick wall, like a scene from Love on the Dole. All those coloured barges sheltering artists and musicians (and later Richard Branson) were still a decade away.
The flat was in the least respectable half of Randolph Avenue, bending down towards the canal, with peeling white stucco columns and flaking black front doors which looked like the portals of some medieval fortress. But the family disapproval also touched the street’s reputation. Only ten years before, this end of the thoroughfare had sported the name ‘Portland Road’, which had been such a notorious red-light district that the council decided to change it.
Downstairs from our flat was a fearsome Alf Garnett figure, string-vested and with a fluent and foul-mouthed command of the language, who would hammer on the ceiling at the slightest provocation. My uncle had a heavier tread than most (submariners tend to be larger than the rest of us), and he could set off the hammering and oaths just by walking across the room.
