To Voltaire, the British class system could be summed up in a sentence. The people of these islands, he said, ‘are like their own beer; froth on top, dregs at bottom, the middle excellent’. A harsh judgment, perhaps, but one that might still have some truth in it today. Yes, we have horrible poverty in our council estates and toffery on our country estates. But Britain is a country that has always taken pride in what we think of as middle-class virtues — hard work, honesty, thrift and self-help.
Today, however, we are witnessing the strange death of the middle class. In Britain, as in the United States, it isn’t just being squeezed — it is actually shrinking and sinking. This is the most disturbing social change of our age and will probably dominate your children’s lives. The lifestyle that the average earner had half a century ago — reasonably sized house, dependable healthcare, a decent education for the children and a reliable pension — is becoming the preserve of the rich. Middle-class pensioners look on amazed at how their children, now into adulthood, seem to have a far harder time.
Just as Britain has an unwritten constitution, so the values of the middle class have been tacitly understood — even if they have proven difficult to define. ‘England,’ declared the Liberal MP Charles Masterman in 1909, ‘is the tone and temper which the ideals and determinations of the middle class has stamped upon it.’ Advocating the Great Reform Act, Lord Brougham put it even better. ‘By the people, I mean the middle classes,’ he said, ‘the wealth and intelligence of the country. The glory of the British name.’ The Conservative party, when it has been most successful, has sought to define and champion the middle class — or, more importantly, its ideals. David Cameron tries, still, now and again. His government, he likes to say, is on the side of ‘hard-working people who do the right thing’.
And how might you define the right thing? Studying hard at school and university, finding a job, getting married, saving money and buying a house. For those who did that, Britain has been — until recently — a superb place to live. Evelyn Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited in 1945 as a requiem for a ruling class that he thought would be supplanted by a new, regnant middle. This seemed to arrive in the Thatcher government, in the ascendancy of a grocer’s daughter from Grantham who revered small businessmen and savers. It struck many as crude, certainly déclassé. But it seemed to represent a transfer of power from the well-born elite and towards a self-confident middle class. » | Ed West and Fraser Nelson | Saturday, August 24, 2013
