Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes?. David Boyle

outperform the others in the US scholastic aptitude tests. For a moment this seemed to be a justification for all those middle-class efforts at saving for education, a way to glimpse the essence of middle-class life actually there under the microscope. But the revelation that those who are not able to resist the instant marshmallow are often children of single parents, where the father is absent, rather undermined it as a middle-class definition. It isn’t that the instant marshmallow children are psychologically different; they are just more worried about the future. They have learned to grab their chance while they have it.

      Even so, there is still something here about a distinctive middle-class approach to thinking ahead and their obsession with education – not always as an ideal but as a way of defining themselves against the other. So many people I talked to about this book began their replies to me: ‘I don’t want to sound snobbish, but …’ As if the very act of defining themselves as middle-class was somehow aggressive and disapproving. As if the heart of middle-class identity, even now, stems from a fear of fecklessness, disorder and ignorance. No wonder people sound apologetic, and no wonder the middle classes feel so embattled – defending themselves against the encroaching tide at the same time as battling with each other for the scarce resource, the edge in education.

      ‘The middle class family has become both citadel and hothouse,’ wrote Professor Cindi Katz, describing the American documentary Race to Nowhere by the San Francisco lawyer and mother-of-three Vicki Abeles, inspired by the suicide of a local teenager and describing the panic attacks of middle-class children pushed beyond the limit by their competitive parents. She describes the American middle classes ‘cultivating perfectly commodified children for niche marketing in a future that feels increasingly precarious’.⁵¹

      Cindi Katz urges an ‘unplugging’ to rescue children for a proper childhood, but she doesn’t see how. ‘It seems almost impossible to unplug while others are plugging away (taking advanced placement classes, studying in high achievement school tracks, attending sports clinics, and the prize is university admission).’

      This desperate panic is part of the same ‘squeeze’ phenomenon. It is considerably less intense than it is in the USA, but it is happening in the UK too. We have all seen the poor middle-class battery hens in their uniforms, weighed down by satchels of homework and the cares of the world.

      Perhaps this begins to explain the embarrassment about claiming middle-class status, the implied disapproval – the failure to celebrate its best values, the inverted snobbery directed at suburban values in so much British culture, even the ad breaks. ‘Never has a section of society so enthusiastically co-operated in its own euthanasia,’ wrote Patrick Hutber back in 1976.⁵² Still so today, perhaps even more so.

      I don’t quite understand this. It is true that the English middle classes can demonstrate a debilitating snobbery and a boneheaded dullness – their failure to understand the changing world about them is at the heart of their current problems. But they also represent enduring values from generation to generation, which I inherited from my parents and grandparents and am proud to have done – about learning and tolerance, a determination to make things happen, about courage and leadership and, yes, even creativity. I have a feeling this double-headed set of values goes to the heart of the problem, as the middle classes maintain their principles in the face of constant self-criticism, in case they are espousing the wrong ones. Are they approving of scholarship or criticizing people who refuse to learn?

      The problem is that saying that they are middle-class seems to be admitting to a whole shedload of prejudices, snobberies and pursed-lipped disapprovals. Some of this is clearly caricatured – most middle-class people these days are among the most tolerant people in the world, not just in the UK – but some of it is undoubtedly real. The middle classes may be unfailingly polite in public, but there is definitely an undercurrent of grouchiness, which might explain the apology. It is the impression they give themselves that they are somehow the thin red line that prevents the nation being overwhelmed by fecklessness, brutishness or a branded nightmare of violent computer games, dominated by Tesco, McDonald’s or Virgin.

      I have to be honest about myself here. I have looked unflinchingly in the mirror and it is true: I also harbour this quite unjustified disapproval. Of how people dress, how they shop, how they spit on the pavement or scream at their children. So, if there has to be a hint of an apology about being middle-class it is because of this fear at the heart of it, that we all know about but do not articulate – that drives us in our financial decisions, or our choice of schools and places to live, in what we buy, how we dress and how we behave.

      But let’s not go overboard here. Even those who apologized to me about sounding middle-class are among the most open-minded people I know. There is an extraordinary inverted snobbery in British culture about this, which is far tougher on the fantasies of the middle classes than on anyone else, and it has turned the middle classes in on themselves. It is hard to see any portrayal of middle-class families on TV in the UK where there is no hideous secret under the carpet or in the closet. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a happy middle-class family portrayed on Casualty without it turning out that the father is a child molester or the mother a secret addict (though sometimes it is the other way around).

      None of this suggests that the pursed lips are justified, or that other classes are any less loving. You only have to watch the mixture of classes and races struggling to teach their children to swim in my local swimming pool on Saturday mornings to realize that. I certainly don’t suggest that there are no neglectful middle-class parents either. It is all very sensitive.

      It may always have been a bit like this. When the English middle classes emerged as we might recognize them now, in the 1820s, it was a process driven by geography. The middle classes were those who were geographically separated from their workplace. But they had also discovered the joys of political economy and took it up with a moral fervour. ‘Political economy’, said the Reverend Thomas Chalmers, the great Victorian exponent of charity, ‘is but one grand exemplification of the alliance, which the God of righteousness hath established, between prudence and moral principle on the one hand, and physical comfort on the other.’⁵³ There it is again – that same duality: values, but bound up with unforgivable smugness.

      For those early middle classes, the way that money worked, and its apparent moral behaviour – rewarding hard work – brought economics almost to the level of religious truth. It drove the boom in self-help and self-education and it carved out both the drive and the fears of the middle classes in the future. It made the great middle-class ideal – what the sociologist Ray Pahl called ‘the dogs bounding round the lawn, the children with their ponies, a gentle balanced life’ – seem almost a moral one. The more embattled that ideal becomes, and the more embarrassed they are about it, the more the middle classes seem to cling to it.

      Behind all the clichés, this is in many ways the life so many people want – independent, peaceful, leisured, safe, where they can create the home and the life around them, stay healthy, and pass some of those values of imagination and independence on to their children. It is precisely this ideal, and the best values that lie behind it, that is now in danger.

      The thrift has gone. I no longer go into my friends’ houses and find that their fridge or stove is older than I am, and sometimes older than their parents. But the Crunchies give a bit of a clue. The middle classes, whoever they are, are absolutely committed to health, independence and education and whatever will promote it, even if they interpret the path to that ideal – working harder or working less – in very different ways.

      It still requires sacrifice, saving and planning ahead. It still means deferred gratification. It still means the middle classes turn out independent-minded, intelligent children quite capable of understanding the world, even if sometimes they don’t. But it also explains that embattled sense that goes beyond economics. This is a cultural struggle for survival as well as an economic one. As Paul Ray said about the American ‘cultural creatives’: they demand authenticity, but they tend to believe their tastes and beliefs are shared by themselves and a few friends – and beyond that, the wasteland.⁵⁴

      The terrible truth is that the key to this health and independence is education, that the opportunities