As the middle classes feel the pain of comparison with the super-rich, we lose all enthusiasm for the common good
Jenni Russell
Friday January 18, 2008
The Guardian
A couple of years ago I read a moving article in the British Medical Bulletin about the psychological pain caused by inequality. An unemployed working-class man described the internal humiliation he experienced whenever he encountered the well-dressed, casually confident middle classes. He talked of the embarrassment and shame he felt at sitting next to one such woman in a waiting room. "I start sweating, I start bungling, shuffling ... You know you insult them ... they look at you like they're disgusted ... Straight away you feel, I shouldn't be there. It makes you not want to go out ... It fucking stresses you. You get exhausted ... It's everywhere."
This description of the practical, private, daily consequences of living with low status in a stratified society was a sharp illustration of theoretical studies of inequality. Research by academics such as Richard Wilkinson and Michael Marmot has exposed the statistical connections between status and health, and status and life expectancy. What they have shown is that even small differences in status have a significant effect on longevity and wellbeing. The man in the bulletin showed how social injuries are experienced, and how they might accumulate.
What I didn't expect was that a similar sense of inadequacy would start to be evident among people at the other end of the scale. But that is what is happening. The rise of the super-rich, and their capacity to outbid others in the competition for houses, schools, space and possessions, has produced a new definition of success. It is one that excludes whole swaths of professionals. Doctors, publishers, managers and academics who began their careers in the expectation that they would lead comfortable lives and feel proud of their social position are now experiencing a sharp sense of dislocation. But that experience isn't leading, as one might expect, to a generalised support for greater equality. Instead it's frequently giving rise to a sense that individuals must fight to preserve what they have at all costs.
A senior civil servant moved his family out of London three years ago because he and his wife, a part-time doctor, could not afford to live in an area with good state schools. He now commutes 200 miles and sees his family for less than half the week. He says ruefully that when he chose his career, in the 80s, it was in the belief that all middle-class jobs would offer much the same rewards. City brokers and lawyers might earn double what others did, but that was their reward for being bored. What he never anticipated was that City salaries would be 10 or 20 times his own, and that he would be priced out of living in the capital. "It can make you feel a little bitter." He's stopped seeing his wealthy former friends, because he tires of hearing them wonder how to spend their half-million bonuses. "Mixing across the income range is quite taxing."
At one recent party an architect I was talking to swerved into a corner with me when she saw a university friend approaching. "Oh God, he's a hedgie," she said. "I can't bear to talk to him." She wasn't making a principled objection to hedge-fund managers but a personal one. "Why," she said, almost venomously, "didn't I go into the City? Why was I such a fool?" I tried the usual liberal lines of consolation. It didn't help. She and her writer husband lived in a small house they couldn't afford to move from, and their teenage children were at barely adequate local schools. She no longer felt pride in her and her husband's career but shame at their failure in the marketplace. And what hurt most deeply was the fear that her own children might do worse. They would never be able to own property in London because there wasn't enough family capital to help them do so.
People in these positions bemoan the growth in inequality. They all agree that there should be greater redistribution from the rich to the poor. But in almost every case, "rich" is defined as someone richer than the speaker, and "inequality" tends to mean their own sense of being unequal. No one I talked to about this, left-leaning or not, felt any enthusiasm for paying more towards some general good. They not only feel under financial pressure, but they are increasingly conscious of living in a harsh world in which they must secure their own pensions, pay for their own dental treatment and care in old age, and attempt to protect their children from the consequences of living in an era of global competitiveness. Everyone is now aware that as the rewards for reaching the top have grown exponentially, so the penalties for failing have grown more savage. As one Labour-voting father said, inequality eats away at the spirit of community. He feels he can't risk his children falling to the bottom, and he wants to use what he has to help them, rather than contributing more to the common pot.
This closing down of concern for others is echoed by Scandinavian research. Academics discovered the middle classes supported greater equality of opportunity in education only as long as the middle class was expanding - in other words, only on condition that their children's social position was not threatened by others' upward mobility. Last week researchers at Oxford University concluded that Britain was in just that position. There was a big expansion of the middle classes from the 60s to the 90s, but the academics warned it was a one-off event. From now on, any upward mobility would have to be matched by someone else's downward mobility.
What this implies is that the traditional left denunciation of inequality may not be the rallying call it was. More of us are feeling the pain of inequality, but we are increasingly fearful that we, individually, might suffer if we are asked to redress it. It's why the Tories' plans to tax non-doms and cut inheritance tax were so instantly popular. They appealed both to people's indignation and their self-protective instincts.
Addressing the real conflicts of interest will be a complex matter, but one thing is clear: the government has long taken the position that the wealth of those at the very top doesn't matter to the rest of society. They have concentrated their energy on helping those at the bottom. It isn't enough. We are all social beings, and we assess our worth by looking at those around us. Labour should be bold enough to start by increasing taxes on the very wealthy - simply because, as a society, we can't afford to make that the standard against which the rest of us are measured.
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