Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes?. David Boyle
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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 they are displacing – which is anyway on the exhausted side. Since the original Crystal Palace building, designed by Joseph Paxton, burned down so spectacularly in 1936, nothing much has changed around here except for the closure one by one of the public toilets and the slow march of gentrification, as confident and as doubt-free as the Plantation of Ulster.
So there has been a flurry of excitement locally about the opening of this café, run by the televisual Laura and Jess who have made such a success of the café in the next station down the line. Even so, there are not so many people here at our odd collection of rescued 1960s tables, with the red Formica tops and strange tapering legs, hallmarks of an alien civilization.
The usual herds of buggies that clutter up middle-class cafés in the mornings these days are conspicuous by their absence. Instead there is a whole collection of black cocker spaniels, with their owners. One of them turns out to be called Peggotty, a distinctively middle-class literary reference (David Copperfield).
There is also a mixture of class symbols in this café, with its tomatoes being chopped behind the counter and the carrot cakes sweltering above it. The blackboard advertises porridge with seeds, honey and yoghurt. I am drinking green tea as if it were going out of fashion. The walls have been whitewashed. Aluminium saucepans hang from the ceiling (do they ever use them?). On the blackboard above me are the lines from The Sound of Music about climbing every mountain (we know from Mike Savage’s research (see page 44) that the working classes never go to musicals, so this is as clear a sign that we are in middle-class territory as anything else).
Yet dotted around are also the traditional symbols of working-class café life – rusty old signal lamps, third-hand furniture, and here in front of me a tomato-shaped plastic dispenser for ketchup, straight from the 1960s. It is as if the symbolism of working-class culture in another age is a reliable sign that this is not nouvelle cuisine and the helpings will be encouragingly and comfortingly generous.
Crystal Palace station, with its vast echoing staircases, was built to handle the crowd for FA Cup finals (100,000 people in 1900), which were played here until the advent of Wembley Stadium. The huge Victorian windows of this reclaimed station were the very centre of working-class culture in south London. Yet here we are in 2012, eating our scrambled egg on rye.
‘No, she’s not pushy,’ says Peggotty’s owner behind me. ‘She’s shy and retiring. Just like me.’
The first clue: the staggering house-price escalator
‘Every summer we can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight,
If it’s not too dear.
We shall scrimp and save …’
Paul McCartney, ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, December 1966
Spring 1979. No Internet. No mobile phones. No cash machines in the wall. No personal computers (or very few). Only three television channels. Orange street lights. Pirate radio stations. Electric fires. Flared trousers (occasionally). The Central Electricity Generating Board, British Rail, the Department of Health and Social Security and other huge bureaucracies running our lives. Grunwick. The National Front and the Anti-Nazi League. Tom Robinson and ‘Glad to be Gay’. Works to rule. Closed shops. Angela Rippon, Morecambe & Wise and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy on the TV. Brian Redhead and Jimmy Young on the radio. Prince Charles still unmarried. James Callaghan in his last few months, and his last few sessions of beer and sandwiches, at 10 Downing Street. Patrick Hutber’s The Decline and Fall of the Middle Class on the bookstalls.1
It was my middle year at university, shivering in a room with no central heating. I had long hair and dreamed of student revolts that – as it turned out – had long since disappeared. This was the generation caught between the certainties of the hippies and the certainties of the yuppies which the novelist A. S. Byatt writes about so sensitively (and I appreciate it because I was one of them). I had no idea at the time, nor for many years afterwards, what I wanted to do with my life, and couldn’t imagine anyone ever employing me – let alone paying