I agree. It was not a particularly inspiring article and I do not agree everyone used to be able to afford to live in central London. nearly 30 years ago we had to buy in zone 5 (outer London). Our first house there costs about £275,000 these days which is not an impossible sum to afford if you have 2 full time careers.
In case of interest here is the article:
I was born in Little Venice, a corner of central London that wraps itself around a great grey-green greasy stretch of water called the Regent?s Canal. 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.
But there are many kinds of middle class. 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.
In my case, both grandfathers were in the services, one a colonel and the other a captain in the navy. Their pensions and various modest pots of inherited money and property gave them relatively comfortable retirements. I owe my grandparents a great deal for their love and care, but also perhaps for placing me so unambiguously in such a recognisable 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 the street had been a notorious red-light district. Downstairs 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.
We moved to another rented flat when I was about three, though I have wandered down that street many times and watched the slow transformation of the red-light district, first into respectability and then into luxury. At a dinner party a few years ago, I ran into a couple who lived at the top of the building where I started out. They told me that our flat was now inhabited by the head of Benetton Europe. It had become, through the strange metamorphosis of gentrification, a fitting home for the new class of ultra-rich.
During my lifetime ? even my adult lifetime ? my contemporaries and I have witnessed an extraordinary revolution in the fortunes of the middle classes, from the widespread doubts in the mid-1970s whether they could survive at all, through to their apotheosis under Thatcher a decade later. The revolution was carried forward into staggering house-price inflation, as previously careful and respectable middle-class investors began to cream off the rewards of the next property bubble.
Public policy has been intended to promote the middle-class life ever since. So given that extraordinary shift in fortunes ? and the cascade of money through property and financial services known as Big Bang ? why is it that the middle classes feel so threatened?
Why have their homes and way of life and retirements become virtually unaffordable, with home ownership falling steadily, and now lower than in Romania and Bulgaria? Why are they in such a panic about their children?s education? Why has their professional judgment been shunned? And why have they allowed their hardworking duty to career, family and salary to be so futile ? given that, however successful they become, there is a banker half their age whose bonus makes them look ridiculous? In short, why are we wondering again whether the distinctive lifestyles of the English middle classes can survive?
BY WRITING about the plight of the middle classes, I am not implying that nobody else is suffering ? quite the reverse. But I make no apology for defending them, or assuming that they are worth defending, because I believe there is something about middle-class life in the UK that is worth preserving. Not the privilege, not the snobbery, but the right of everyone to live the kind of independent life I was brought up with and which I struggle to provide for my own family.
I am a self-employed writer so I am hardly wealthy (I am probably the only person to conduct an independent review for the government on tax credits). But I went to independent school, in the days when we still called them ?public schools?, and was constantly told that I was privileged without being told what that might imply. I live in a small detached home with a lawn. I have an allotment. I shop at Waitrose, at least when I can afford it.
I have had a huge number of conversations about being middle class. One was with Deborah Lane, who went online to explain her financial struggles. When she wrote the words ?I?m skint? on her blog, which tracks the peculiarities of a middle-class life in west London, her readership suddenly went up from double figures to thousands.
It was written as a cry from the heart of the beleaguered middle classes. But when you have a £900,000 home in west London, and the endless leafy suburbs of middle-class book clubs, parents? evenings and recycling classes stretching all around, why would you worry about money?
?I would say I had aspirations,? Deborah tells me as we sip our coffee and tea next to the river in Hammersmith. ?I always wanted to be married. I knew where I was going to live and how I was going to live.?
It has not really turned out like that, despite her husband?s earnings as a successful photographer. ?I never thought we would be struggling in the way that we are, for every little thing. We do get to do some of the nice things, but not without some kind of anguish. We can no longer afford to go away. Our main summer holiday is five days in Mallorca in the half-term, when the prices are lower.?
She agrees that she still leads a ?privileged life?. So why is she struggling to educate her two children privately? It is easy to disapprove of middle-class parents who balk at the prospect of sending their children to the school they have been allocated, until it comes to your own children and their welfare ? which explains the stressful competition for places in ?good? schools, especially perhaps where Deborah lives in London.
The allocated state school offered to put her son on the ?gifted children? programme just because he could spell a couple of three-letter words at the age of five, she said. It made her absolutely determined not to take up the offer, but the decision costs money. A lot of it.
She describes how she and her husband have stopped paying into a pension in the struggle to keep paying the fees in dribs and drabs. ?They?re not even instalments; they are kind of random instalments ? here?s another £800 to go in the pot. We have already spent £100,000 in school fees, and my kids are only seven and nine, and they are in the cheapest private school in this area.?
Only 7% of UK parents pay school fees (much the same as it was a generation ago, though 17% of school places in London are private). The fees at secondary level are beyond all but the very highest-paid, but scholarships and other assisted places are much more available than they used to be. Yet there is something else implied in the conversation with Deborah that is important.
It is the fear that this has nothing to do with the temporary economic downturn, and that there is a fundamental shift going on that marks the slow decline of the middle classes as an identifiable segment of British life ? the end, not so much of privilege, but of what the middle classes believe they stand for: education, culture, leadership.
The fear is that this generation will be the last to live the aspirational middle-class life, that the future will be an endless, heartbreaking succession of small shifts downwards towards a precarious existence, dependent on mean employers, short contracts, demanding landlords and state handouts in old age.
?All my friends are struggling,? Deborah adds, and again she is not alone. Two-thirds of middle-income people in the UK are not saving for a pension. Half of them also struggle with bills every day, but the unease goes deeper than paying the bills in the middle of a global downturn.
The middle classes find it hard to articulate it even to themselves, but the truth is that they can no longer afford the life they always imagined having. It is not that they are greedy or want something for nothing. But they did assume, because that is what they were always told, that they would have a life like their parents and grandparents ? a comfortable home, a respected professional position and good schools for their children.
They now willingly submit to a quarter of a century of mortgage discipline ? in jobs that frustrate them and force them to buy expensive childcare ? just to pay hugely inflated house prices.
And no matter how much they earn, there is a banker?s bonus somewhere that makes their effort look ridiculous. Worse, they seem unlikely to be able to fund their own retirement, except by the very house-price inflation that will exclude their children from the housing market.
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