After reading the British newspaper The Daily Mail today, it's clear things are not good in the UK. There is an article about a man, heavily in debt, who murdered his wife and 2 little girls and then hanged himself. And another horror story about a respectable middle-class man who recently lost his job - he and his wife were hosting a luncheon at their home with some other couples. After the guests had left, they got into an argument and he accused her of burning the roast beef. She retaliated by throwing plates at him and that's when he hit her with one punch, killing her instantly.
Also in the same paper, Charlotte Metcalf says she's seen her income shrink by half in the last decade and now struggles to make ends meet. She is just one of the middle-class paupers putting on a brave face and pretending nothing has changed when in fact it has. This is her story:
My partner and I started a new business and we borrowed and borrowed and bought a country house alongside the two we owned between us in London. We practically rebuilt it while I fussed over the kitchen, oohing and aahing over paint and butler sinks. We moved to the Cotswolds and I even bought another cottage as an 'investment'. What hubris! When the recession hit, we realised the value of our properties had slumped and we were largely in negative equity. We had to rearrange our lives totally. Now I live in a two-bedroom rented flat in West London. What I can earn by writing making the occasional short film bring in just enough to cover the rent. For many articles I write, I earn no more than 250 pounds and often struggle to make 500 pounds a week - just over what my rent is. But, superficially, my habits remain the same. I go to parties, eat at restaurants when my friends invite me and pray they don't ask me to go Dutch.
When alcoholics stop drinking, they tell everyone they're on the wagon and avoid their bozier friends. When we stop being able to pay, do we shun our wealthier friends? No, we cling to our old haunts and habits, preferring to go without food at home rather than admit to a friend we can't afford their trendy organic cafe of choice for lunch. We think nothing of donning a dress that once cost the earth to attend a glamorous party or a restaurant opening.
We sip our champagne and move easily among the same old circle of friends, chatting away about what we're up to. In reality, a vast chasm yawns between us and well .... us. Some of us still have bags of money, some of us can't afford to take a cab home. But on the surface, we all look the same. It's as if thousands of middle-class people are dangling in mid-air, legs waving. We've been ejected from our old lives but we're desperately resisting hitting the ground with a splat.
Deborah Risbridger 45, has run her own PR consultancy for more than 20 years. She lives with husband Paul 46 and their three children under ten. This is her story:
'Paul and I are Thatcher's children' Deborah says 'Like many of that generation we believed everything we touched would turn to gold and for the first ten or fifteeen years, it did. We had a phenomenal couple of years, our earnings were rocketing and naively we believed it would go on forever. It wasn't enough income to describe ourselves as wealthy, but what it did was unleash our ability to borrow'.
And borrow they did. Over time and on credit, the Risbridgers acquired all the trimmings of success, a five bedroom house, 15 acres with stables and 14 horses. Top of the range Audi as well as a Range Rover, two children privately educatied and holidays in the Caribbean and Dubai. By 2006 their incomes had dropped but their outgoing hadn't. To add to the problem their properties were all heavily mortgaged with little or no equity remaining. With another child on the way, they didn't want to worry their families. 'We did all we could to keep the charade going' says Deborah, though they were frantically selling their carss and cashing in their endowment policies and pensions.
'There was definitely a sense of shame and I remember feeling that I'd failed in some way. If I didn't have the material wealth or the ability to borrow money, then who the hell was I? I hate to admit it but I think there was an element of saving face. Being secretly poor but having this outwardly wealthy lifestyle took its toll on my mental health and in 2007 I had a nervous breakdown' she said.
Psychologist Oliver James, author of Affluenza and The Selfish Capitalist puts our sense of shame down to the pressure we feel: 'A Birton turning 20 in 1978 was actually more likely than one doing so in 1990 to achieve upward mobility through education. Nonetheless, in today's Big Brother/It Could Be You society, great swathes of the population believe they can become rich and famous and that it is highly desirable to them. This is most damaging of all - the idiology that material affluence is the key to fulfilment and open to anyone willing to work hard enough'.
The common theme of these stories of woe is loss of income. Businesses in the UK are making people redundant at an alarming rate and many middle-class people have to watch helplessly as their once comfortable lifestyles slip away. Now they must face and endure the most frightening threat to all our lives - unemployment - and figure out some way to survive it.
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