Life in the UK: The changing middle class

I have just been reading an MMA article about the attacks on the middle class in America. But it referred to state employees being the middle class. We in Britain also have a middle class but it consists of people in the middle income bracket (around $66,000).They also are being attacked.

Private education is favoured by the middle classes where it can be afforded because it provides far better education than state schools. Parents receive no help from government, in fact every child in a private school saves the government about $15,000 a year in state education costs (in total that is about $7bn a year). In addition to this the Charity Commission’s aim is to force private schools to give free bursaries to poorer students – as these schools are not profit making this means that parents will have to pay higher fees to fund them.

The emphasis of government at the moment is to “help the poor”. Our welfare system ensures that nobody is destitute (in fact a recent study has found that there are 80,000 people who are long term recipients of incapacity benefits because they cannot work through obesity, alcohol and drug addiction). Nobody is on the bread line and if a charity decides to distribute free food it hits the headlines. Income tax allowances have just been increased so that poorer people are taken out of tax altogether. But middle classes were excluded. And they pay tax at 40%, double the standard rate, on income over $74,000.

University education used to be free. Then it became fee-paying with the government giving subsidies backed up by loans to students. Now most subsidy has been stopped and student loans have been made more onerous. Universities are now allowed to charge up to $15,000 a year, but if they charge anywhere near that maximum they have to provide free bursaries to poor children. Again it is the middle classes who are subsidizing the poor.

The poor are also being given priority in university admissions despite the fact that, having come from state schools, their qualifications are not as high as universities would like. Again it is the middle classes with better qualifications who will be rejected. Our Deputy Prime Minister has also said that internships should not be the preserve of the privileged few. He forgets that workers in the mining and shipbuilding industries traditionally get jobs for their sons and relatives. This emphasis on the poor is the policy of the Liberal Democrat side of the coalition government.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has just announced that there should be a new law that would make all Cabinet members and leaders of political parties, editors of national papers and the hundred most successful financiers in the UK spend a couple of hours every year serving dinners in a primary school on a council estate, or cleaning bathrooms in a residential home. I am afraid that he does not have much common sense. His last utterance was that some elements of Sharia law should be incorporated into British justice. The more successful people already contribute most to taxation and to charities.

It seems that the government is making the middle classes pay for past mistakes in education which has prevented social mobility by not educating the poorer pupils properly. There have been many attempts to improve social mobility by piling in money. But nothing will change until state education is brought up to the same level as private education. Then there will be a level playing field.

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