How Britain's middle class was betrayed

Britain's professionals are worried. Their careers and living standards are under threat. Lawyers, doctors, bank managers and postmasters face an uncertain future as faceless corporations take over their work. In the second of three extracts from their new book, Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson reveal how a wealthy elite rewrote all the rules - and conned the middle class.

Illustration: David Parkins

The summer of 2007 was a washout - literally so for people in Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Yorkshire and beyond, who suffered severe flooding. Autumn weather alternated between further rainfall and plunging temperatures. The glorious summer days and fiery autumn colours of 2005 and 2006 seemed a fond memory.

Poor weather was matched by growing unease in the British middle class as 2007 turned into 2008. On every front, its living standards, status and career prospects were threatened, along with such objects of affection as the value of its homes and its children's education.

Life was still sweet for the New Olympians, the pampered rich who run the country's biggest companies and financial institutions. But Middle Britain, that union of the traditional professional middle class and the much wider group of "aspirant" households, was facing the stark possibility that 15 or more years of prosperity were drawing to a close. Worse, its members could have been forgiven a sneaking feeling that they were now the target of the sort of asset stripping that had been visited on the nation's factory workers, on those employed in "primary" industries such as farming, fishing and mining, and on small shopkeepers, thousands of whom had been driven out of business by supermarkets.

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