‘Middle class’ has lost all meaning: we need new ways to talk about society

With a general election imminent, a difficult truth for politicians is that the cost of living crisis is causing real hardship to what we refer to as the “middle class”.

Mortgage rates are spiralling, food prices are higher than they’ve been in a generation. Energy costs may have dipped since the pinch of last winter yet remain expensive, and this year there’s no government help for those with an average income.

Yes, the middle class is hurting – but not everyone in it is hurting equally. That’s because the term now encompasses so many varied financial circumstances that it’s become utterly meaningless. This pointless phrase is being misused to describe the circumstances and concerns of people who are much more affluent than those in the “middle” of our economy.

Worse than that, it’s being employed deliberately to stoke the anxieties of the genuine middle class – who might be defaulting on a mortgage payment this winter, or cancelling a family Christmas because they can’t afford to feed or heat a house full of guests – by conflating their struggles with the concerns of a tiny and much better-off minority.

Take the numerous stories about how the so-called middle class fear the cost of living crisis, and how they worry it means that they will have to pull their children out of private school. In Britain, barely any of the genuine middle class – if we are to retain that phrase at all – use private education. Middle-class parents of school-age children are teachers, town planners, laboratory technicians, social workers, GPs and nurses. Even with recent public sector pay rises their average household incomes, often with two parents working, are £70k-100k before tax.

The average independent secondary school fee – even when accounting for the very cheap and very expensive ones which distort the figure – is around £15-20k a year for each child. If you have two children, a mortgage and the usual household costs you’re not going to be able to find £40,000 a year from a take-home income of around £60,000.

If Labour wins the general election, those fees are only likely to increase further, with Keir Starmer pledging to impose VAT of 20 per cent on fees. This might prompt some families using private schools to revise their views on affordability – but that still doesn’t make it a middle-class problem.

When I posted about this on X (formerly Twitter), people, inevitably, got irritated with me. Many told me that people on lower middle-class incomes really do give up holidays and other treats to scrape their children through the independent sector (even though those sums don’t really add up), while others are making very difficult choices in order to pay for a suitable environment for their child with special educational needs or disabilities (Send). The lack of provision for Send children in underfunded state schools is a major problem, but neither of these middle-class groups is as represented in the independent sector enrolment as these commentators seemed to think.

Some statistics for context, provided helpfully by the Private Education Policy Forum: approximately 6.4 per cent of England’s school-age children are educated in the independent sector, a figure that has been declining – albeit extremely gently – in recent years. That’s just 569,000 pupils. In Wales, it is just 2 per cent of the child population.

If you take out the international student market, the figures are even lower. In the UK, the proportion of children of UK-resident families using private education is approximately 5.8 per cent. Of these, the overwhelming majority (around 90 per cent) come from families within the top 5 per cent of incomes – a very long way from the middle.

So why do we still talk about the concerns of the top 10 per cent of families by income and wealth as “middle class”? It risks spreading anxiety among those who identify as a member of the middle (a huge number) over issues that will never touch them. See also inheritance tax: the abolition of it is a very popular policy for the Conservative Party, despite the fact that it is only payable by relatives following 4 per cent of deaths.

The only way to neuter this misinformation is to speak more meaningfully about the class and economic system that we have right now. The three-tier class system that once divided a blue-collar working class, an educated white-collar middle class and a tiny number of ruling aristocracy has been outdated for more than half a century. So why have we been so resistant to updating our language?

A decade ago, the BBC teamed up with academics from the London School of Economics and the Universities of York and Manchester to come up with a new set of seven classifications. They identified a wealthy “elite” and a salaried “middle class”, a new group of “technical experts”, “new affluent” workers, and, existing below the level of the classic working class, a “precariat”.

These didn’t catch on, though some are very meaningful in today’s economy. The cost of living crisis sadly means that too many of the former working-class group are now entering precarity. The prosperous salaried “middle class” are no longer so prosperous. But by any measure, those who can afford today’s private school fees are part of our elite – even while that elite has many fragments.

It’s time to abandon the safety blanket of calling half, or more, of the country “middle class”. Until we find new, accurate ways to identify our social and economic complexity there will be no way to describe the political change we really need.