Why it's dangerous when the middle classes feel betrayed

Years ago, my friend Iain King cast my horoscope in return for an omelette.  "Yes, I see this in a lot of Lib Dem charts," he said.  "I think it means unreasonable optimism."

Which is a way of explaining that I've always been optimistic.  I don't feel comfortable as Cassandra.  I don't believe in disaster.  I certainly don't believe in extrapolating disastrous trends.

Yet really, sometimes, the middle classes could try Cassandra's patience.  There they are in the UK, staring oblivion in the face in less than a generation, happily shelling out for their indentured servitude by mortgage, and taking out their occasional frustrations by beheading the chair of the Environment Agency and other symbolic officials.

I wrote a book about it.  Rather a good one, though I say it myself (it's called Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis).  It isn't pessimistic, in fact - it suggests a way out.  It even predicts a way out.

But I do occasionally wonder, especially yesterday - when the commentators hail the drop in inflation to 1.9 per cent and the rise in average house prices to a quarter of a million pounds - why there is so little debate about the big trends.

Not whether there is a house price bubble this winter, but whether there has been a disastrous house price revolution in the last 30 years - and whether, if it goes on the same way for another 30 years, the average house price in the UK will actually be £1.2m (it will).

So it is a relief that a commentator with her finger so much on the pulse, like Lucy Mangan, has raised the alarm (thank you, Lucy, for bringing me into the debate as well).  This is what she says:

"Already among my friends there is a sense of betrayal. It used to be (we know, from the parents who lived through it and with whom we are increasingly moving back in to save on housing or childcare costs), that if you played the game, if you did all the right things – were thrifty, diligent, cleaved to the principle of deferred gratification – the system would reward you with leisure time, spare cash and a certain freedom from worry in the short and in the long term. Now the feeling is that you have to outwit the system in order to survive it. Win the lottery, have a brilliant business idea, marry money (no longer a dream confined to women, by the way) or inherit it from several forgotten aunts or a neighbour whose beloved cat you once rescued – something semi-miraculous that will provide the protection modest living, hard work and hard saving once did."

That is exactly right.  Because, despite their denial, I believe Lucy Mangan is right that the middle classes feel that something fundamental has changed.  

These are dangerous moments.  When the middle classes understand that they have been betrayed, by the politicians who governed in their name - and by the financial services who looked after their money - it can get ugly.

The rise of the nationalist right across Europe is one symptom of this betrayal, and of the failure of mainstream political parties to provide any kind of solution - even to articulate the problem.

It is, after all, as much a moral problem as an economic one, because the whole system of deferred gratification on which English middle class life depends has crumbled away.  And every new round of bankers bonuses removes a few more pit props supporting it.

So I am nervous about the future for fear of the politics of betrayal, as much as I am afraid of the economic future for my children in the new sprawling proletariat.

But I am still optimistic.  Because, as Lucy Mangan says, the middle classes still have the power to shift the situation.  If they can grasp what is going on.

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