What is Middle Britain, anyway?

Letters from a Swing Voter

Are you middle class? I’d stake my artisanal cheeses and subscription to the New Statesman that nearly every single one of you thinks you are. More tellingly, do you think you’re a middle income earner? That’s a bit harder to answer, isn’t it? I’d up my stakes to include my MOMA posters and fair-trade coffee to say that the enlightened readers of LabourList will outshine us all in your ability to pop yourselves accurately on the income hierarchy. But the overwhelming majority of the UK population are woefully misplacing themselves on the same scale. The result? Entrenched, polarised incomes and policy which does not take into account the real lives of those on the lower half of the income spectrum.

There’s real confusion over what we mean by ‘Middle Britain’. The term should represent the social group which sits around the midpoint of the UK’s income distribution, but instead it’s been hijacked by the media – and, increasingly, politicians – to describe a group of professional middle classes who occupy the upper half of the income spectrum. ‘Middle Britain’ is not the Telegraph-reading, middle-manager brigade; it’s the 7 million people earning a median wage of £22k a year – that’s as low as £14.5k a year and only ever as high as £33.5k a year – who cannot be grouped by their tastes for news outlets or holiday destinations, but by their unifying preoccupations: job security, personal finance and debt. Big ogres, for millions of families.

Polly Toynbee and David Walker revealed the genuine shock people felt during focus groups in 2007, when told that 90% of the population earns under £40k a year. They also revealed the pervasive feeling that there were ‘deserved’ and ‘undeserved’ financial inequalities – gross bankers salaries were easy to shout down, but as for niggling Middle Britain? The people earning just enough to stay off benefits, but not enough to lose that nauseous feeling at the end of the month? Ah, that was harder to explain away, because there were always opportunities to earn more money. There’s a flip side to every coin – where there are opportunities, there are barriers.

Policy now has to focus on some basic things: skilled jobs provision, public services, fairer tax systems, housing, and social solidarity. All parties risk losing out if they continue to view social welfare as a ‘dependency’, because Middle Britain does want better distribution of wealth and it does want support finding and keeping jobs. It’s not dependency, it’s protection.

This is why Wednesday’s budget was so interesting because it, err, wasn’t particularly interesting. More humbling were the hurried voxpops from ‘normal’ people some harassed reporters were sent out to find to try and bring the budget figures to life. But there was no life. For Middle Britain, the unrelenting drudgery of everyday life is a dull ache; a constant reminder of 13 years of battery and dismissal.

So I can joke about artisanal cheeses and the like, but it comes from somewhere deeper. I remember an old Fast Show sketch which featured well dressed, well spoken people having a dinner party and arguing how middle class they were; the ‘winner’ said his family used wooden salad bowls. My parents used wooden salad bowls, but they also waited until their kids went to bed before they argued and cried about the fact my mum was the sole earner and we were close to losing the house. I couldn’t marry how we could aspirationally sit at one end of the scale, but our reality was so far at the other.

Labour, you’ve opened some small chinks of light on these barriers by addressing things like tax credits, rights for parents at work, subsidised childcare, a national minimum wage. When they work, they work, and so schemes like Sure Start must be continued – as must your sudden and revised set of promises on council housing. Hell, even your stamp duty holiday for first time buyers is a step in the right direction. But I can understand why the squeezed real Middle Britain, those who have fared worse out of the recession but have been largely misrepresented by parties of all colours, won’t give you another term to try them out. Give us policy which represents real life, and maybe there can be a different ending.