The Financial Fairness Foundation has a new report out this morning of which they say:
This paper outlines key findings from Caught in the middle? Insecurity and financial strain in the middle of the income distribution by Professor Donald Hirsch. Professor Hirsch's new research considers the multiple pressures faced by people in different income bands, and particularly those in the middle of the distribution(the middle fifth of households ranked by income, adjusted for household size), that affect their ability to maintain a decent standard of living.
They note that:
They then add:
From, this they conclude:
And you now wonder why I think the Taxing Wealth Report 2024 is important with its emphasis on redistribution of income?
When the middle class is being gutted by the economy the Tories have created we are in trouble, and that is exactly what is happening.
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Professor Danny Dorling recently wrote that current research shows that the demographic paying the highest effective rate of tax in the UK was a two parent family with three children and a total yearly income of £55,000. In other words what always used to be thought of as the average family with 2.4 children.
It is hard to think of a statistic that better illustrates the mess this country has become over the last 45 years.
I addressed this in the last tax recommendation in the TWR
This is front page news really isn’t it?
Your government is making you poorer.
Indeed. There are, however, many out there willing to shoot themselves in the foot in the name of political faith.
In defence circles it now seems that most have woken up to the hollowing out of the armed forces by this government. However the same group would not change their voting habits and so the story has changed. No longer do we hear that the Tories are good for defence and Labour bad. What we hear now is simply that Labour would be worse.
Sometimes, it seems, that not even self interest is enough to shake political faith.
And you can’ t normally tell by appearances. A friend’s 12-year-old is invited by her local school to join a trip to France; three nights – £500. All her friends are going. They need a family holiday but can’t afford both.
While other families, who certainly also need a family holiday, cannot afford a family meal.
While I accept that middle earners are now facing a degree of hardship, I find it hard to empathise when I consider the attitude they have previously been successfully instructed to take towards the ‘scroungers and work shy’.
Please read what is written: the chance iof moving between the categories is now quite high
Artificial divides and pretending they are absolute really does not help any more.
yep the only conclusion is taxes on the middle classes is way too high
No, their job insecurity is far too low
Surely their job insecurity is too high and their job security too low? Unless I’m reading it wrong, apologies if so.
If I write in haste, apologies
The fear in the middle classes has been around a while it has been stoked by the Mail/Telegraph/Tories… and directed “downwards” – to immigrants, scroungers, health tourists etc..
But there comes a point where this narrative fails. When you are forced to navigate the Benefits system (… but, but, I am not a scrounger!!). When you are in hospital (if you can get in) and all the patients are your neighbours and the staff immigrants (who are, of course actually your neighbours, too if you had “got out more”).
Are we there yet? No. Why not? Because Labour refuses to articulate the counter narrative….
Thank you and well said, Clive.
I walk to and fro the station(s) and commute to the City from mid Buckinghamshire. Stoke Mandeville hospital and some care homes are nearby.
Most of the staff at these places are immigrants from India (often Kerala), the Philippines, West Indies and Africa. They often walk to work and in uniform, blue, so relatively recognisable in warmer months. This has been the case for over a dozen years, but really since the late 1940s. I often wonder if those going elsewhere see this and what they think of it, especially when, for example, further to Cleverly’s recent announcement about such staff not being able to bring their dependants, hear stop immigration and start repatriation.
Thank you, Richard.
I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s and expected this, even then. After gutting the working class, the parasites had to move up the social ladder. In addition, who had / has the lifestyles, assets and services ripe for gutting. I don’t understand and have never understood the middle class cheerleaders for neo-liberalism.
Growing up in Buckinghamshire, from the 1980s and 1990s, I saw the light industry disappear, but that did not stop Buckinghamshire voting blue. In the early 1990s, the Maxwell printing workers and retirees found their pension pots emptied. There are people in Buckinghamshire who had pensions stolen by Maxwell or the parents were robbed by Maxwell.
I went to school with and later worked for people whose money worked for them, not the other way round. School contemporaries had aristocratic names like Howard, Russell and Feilding and industrial names like Cunard, Samuel and Westinghouse. That carried on in the City. I just don’t understand how so many people, including centrists*, feel they have anything in common with these types. They live in different worlds, worlds I have some experience of.
Further to what Paul Langston and Joe Burlington write above, I often tell people resident here about what services France provides at little or no cost, e.g. creches and even bicycle lessons to young children and colonie de vacances and other school trips, and how the French state pension compares to the UK’s. They are amazed. What puzzles me is how many people from here travel overseas, but observe so little. I add that the French get a better deal because they take to the streets, as farmers are this week.
Col Smithers
Fascinating and spot on BTW.
Please keep coming here is all I can say.
I was intrigued to read your comments here, Col Smithers. I used to work for Equitable Life with its head office in Aylesbury although I was based at their offices in Birmingham at the time. When they got into financial difficulties and ceased trading, many of us lost our pension entitlement. After a long legal battle, and with the help of HMRC, I later managed to get the GMP element of my pension paid, but lost the rest.
There is a parallel here with the Mirror Group and Maxwell.
Having squeezed the pips out of the working class, the only way is up!
And once the middle class gets squeezed as well, the conditions are ripe for hard right populism and possibly (probably?) fascism.
Inequality is the core problem, according to Gary Stevenson, the bright working class lad from Ilford who got into The City and made himself a multi millionaire.
I stumbled across this interview with him yesterday. He’s absolutely spot on with the insanity of the city, the foolishness of economists, and the direction of travel of the UK economy and inequality.
Warning: not for the expletive sensitive!
The secret economics destroying Britain | Gary Stevenson interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVvoyRpxG-A
As the colonel and others say above
neoliberalism works only for the 1% the super rich
It succeeded in gutting the working class and the middle class didn’t give a shite
It is now gutting the middle class
it will then move on to the upper middle class and finally the upper class
That’s how it works it’s how it’s meant to work
Now with both major political parties in UK funded by pretty much the same donors the policies will be near identical the people at the top are mere reflections of each other it’s just that some are slipperier and smarter than others
This is simply the deliberate extinction of the Middle Classes, which I’ve been drawing attention to for some time, becoming more visible. Civil unrest thus draws closer, ushering in a new Dark Age, which might in its way actually be quite enjoyable for some. Days lately increasingly feel like just another example of the last few that Rome had. Still, this time at least we can see it coming and can prepare. I will remind potential critics we’ve had Boris Johnson as a Prime Minister; we can’t expect to survive as a culture.
Hmmmmm………………..hypocrisy is the fuel of middle class Britain I’m afraid.
The English middle class eh – stuck between the escape velocity of being poor, and too busy accelerating up the social ladder and too (shall we say) interested in joining their social betters to worry about what is actually happening to them.
But this same blindness is that which also helps them to lose their scruples on the way up.
I know a fellow who is a director of company (an ex pubic sector one of course) who would love to be a teacher but instead makes sure he has a job with a big fat bonus that employs people on a pittance so that his wife can have an Aga and be kept in the manner to which she has become accustomed. She ‘paints’ and sells what she produces to unsuspecting buyers in the name of ‘self-realisation’.
I have no doubt that he would make a great teacher. But he’s worked out where he could make more money like him and many other fuckers have.
I bought a copy of Kelton’s ‘The Deficit Myth’ for him, prefacing it with the words of Thoreau:
‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to (con)front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die ,discover that I had not lived’.
He never opted to discuss the book once and went on to support the Lib Dims (sic).
And do you know why he won’t discuss things like this and many more middle class won’t like my brother in law and late father in law?
Because the current mode of economic thinking has worked for them – that’s why, that is what they all have in common. If things work for you, I would say that your intellectual curiosity would be somewhat limited? They are too fat and comfortable because of it. For now at least. OK, they see things that bother them but coffee mornings and holidays abroad can be used to acknowledge those and tut tut a bit over local delicacies, fine wines and ‘I’ve made it’.
The middle class of Britain has been Thatcherised – well and truly.
On the other hand, the way in which public sector pay has been reduced is also part of the problem that has to be addressed. It is only fair to say that as well.
My brother in law who is that rich he is now a part-time Englishman could not find an NHS dentist recently in his area of London. It was obviously because the dentists – underpaid by successive governments including Labour ones – had worked out the property values and obviously cottoned on the wealth around them and – BINGO!
Explaining to my BiL that he had been set up to be exploited was an interesting discussion because like many of them, he knows how to get wealthy but not really why. He still thought he should get NHS treatment? Hmmm……………..
Sorry about this class war ridden comment of mine – I’m just a working class thug who got let into university by mistake – as a result I sit on the fence between the gutter where I came from and a middle class suburban dreamland I’ll never reach and my balls constantly hurt. I have nothing good to say about the working class or middle class in this Godforsaken dump to be honest.
But I think you get my drift………………………………….
As Yanis Varoufakis would say: austerity is another word for class war.
Here’s another monetarily illiterate article from the Guardian which despite its so-called progressiveness appears to be incapable of spotting the big lie the government doesn’t operate on a credit card and government deficits are necessary to allow the private sector to save.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/21/jeremy-hunt-tax-boost-uk-budget-surplus-tax-cuts-election
Thanks