Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes?. David Boyle
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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 of thrift – the savings and financial sector – have turned against the middle classes and are actively funnelling their wealth out of their reach. They have disguised their fears of the future from themselves with ever greater debts, and their education, cars and holidays – core features of a middle-class life – are more often now funded by increasingly big loans.
There is no doubt that the English middle classes have an extraordinary gift for absorbtion and reinvention. Over the centuries they have integrated Roman Catholics, Jews, Nonconformists and a whole range of other domestic and immigrant groups, and are still doing so today. On the other hand, if the middle classes were really dedicated primarily to thrift – an idea that seems to have been banished by the credit card – you might reasonably wonder whether they still exist at all. In my own generation, in a period of rising prices, those who have done better financially are those who borrowed the most. Whatever that amounts to, it isn’t thrift.
Which brings us to the other objection. Maybe there is no longer any such thing as ‘the middle classes’ anyway. Maybe they have long since been subsumed – along with the working classes – into a large lump of Middle England, with our two children each, our front gardens paved, our wii machines churning out the detritus from American and Japanese culture.
Struggling with this same question in 1949, Angus Maude and Roy Lewis suggested, tongues slightly in their cheeks, that the difference between the middle classes and the rest was that they used napkin rings – on the grounds that the working classes never used them and the upper classes used a clean napkin at every meal.41 It is one definition. I have to admit that, although there may be napkins somewhere in my own house, there is nothing remotely like a napkin ring (though my parents use them). But don’t let’s dismiss this too quickly. This is one of the respondents to a modern version of the wartime survey Mass Observation talking about class in 1990:
I was ill at ease … when invited to the home of a girlfriend who lived in a wealthy quarter of Wolverhampton. I was there for lunch, and while I was quietly confident my table manners would stand scrutiny, I was disconcerted to find a linen table napkin rolled in an ivory ring on my side plate. It was my first encounter with a napkin and while I knew it should be laid on the lap and not tucked into the shirt collar I could not think what to do with it when the meal was finished. It worried me greatly and finally I laid it nonchalantly on my plate in a crumpled heap …42
This was quoted in a study by one of the leading sociologists of class in the UK, Professor Mike Savage of York University, comparing how people talked about class then and in the 1940s, in the original Mass Observation surveys. His conclusion was that class is now not so much a designation as a starting point in a long story about your identity. You can try the experiment yourself. Ask someone what class they come from, preferably someone you know well to avoid a clash, and after some agonies – there is still a huge reluctance among the middle classes about declaring themselves as such – they will tell you the story of their life. Researching this book, I found that to be true over and over again.
Despite people’s reluctance to say they are middle-class, the Future Foundation’s Middle Britain report in 2006 found that 43 per cent identified themselves as middle-class. Another survey concluded that about a quarter of the population were middle-class but preferred not to say so. It is hard to find a lucid definition these days, certainly when we get beyond the napkins. You can’t do it