Myth of the Coping Class

Let a harmonica player quaver a blues for the British bourgeoisie, which has fallen on hard times. Tumbleweed is rolling down a Henley street past boarded-up wine bars and antique shops. On the evening train back to Tunbridge Wells, solicitors slump dog-tired from their day's toil in the nit-picking fields. By the dusty roadside in St Albans a property consultant holds a crude sign proclaiming: "Will work for claret.”

Such piteous scenes are easily imagined if you believe a slew of articles in non-pink newspapers concerning the "Coping Class”. Their thesis has been that a swathe of the middle class is in dire financial straits as its tax and living costs soar. The centre of this disaster varies according to the target readership of each publication. But the common theme, as prcised by the splendidly splenetic Daily Mail is this: "The obscenely rich are getting richer, while the middle classes, working harder than ever, are becoming steadily poorer.”

I could relate to that. I am middle-class. Throughout my career I have often felt I am "working harder than ever” for pay that undervalues my unique talents. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs that I know have become multi-millionaires. Billionaires, even. Simply by being smart, taking big risks and putting in 85-hour weeks. Some of them have not even been to university. It hardly seems fair.

The term "Coping Class” is gaining a toehold in business as well as among scribblers like me. The chief executive of a household goods company I dined with reported that marketing folk now use it in such contexts as: "Would a two-for-one on organic facial scrub play well with the Coping Class?” He added: "The Coping Class is more a state of mind that a real group of people.”

Nor was there ever a real Mondeo Man or a tribe of Pebbledash People. Yet these labels for putative types of Briton were influential in two successive elections. My hunch is that the idea of the Coping Class could catch on in politics as the economy slows. Even though there is no convincing evidence that it exists.

Articles on the Coping Class have relied on wobbly pyramids of factoids for their authority. The Daily Telegraph fretted at the expiry of cheap fixed-rate mortgage deals. But this is a problem for working-class borrowers as well as middle-class ones. The Mail observed that food and energy prices had gone up a lot. Yet the poorer you are, the greater the proportion of disposable income absorbed by these costs. The Guardian, meanwhile, stated that an average Briton's income, after tax and housing costs, had fallen as a percentage of the gross amount. It did not mention that the average Briton was still better off thanks to income growth.

David Philips, of the heavyweight Institute for Fiscal Studies, says that median disposable income has risen about 20 per cent in real terms before housing costs since 1997. The increase is higher again after rent and mortgage payments are deducted, partly because many older people now own their dwellings outright.

Even the Tory-leaning Centre for Policy Studies cannot prove that disposable household income has fallen, despite valiant efforts in its recent paper "Why do we feel so broke?”. Those milksops at the Office for National Statistics could only come up with figures showing stagnation in 2007. The CPS had to devise its own average household to generate a decrease in disposable income of more than 1,000 to 15,200 last year.

Although average incomes are cited in articles on the Coping Class, the milieu evoked is not that of a median household with gross income of a mere 30,000. The term smacks instead of a professional couple shopping at Waitrose and dreaming of owning a second home in Cornwall. The typical household income posited by one commentator for the Coping Class is 88,000 a year, well into the top decile of UK earnings.

Perhaps the answer to the question "Why do we feel so broke?” when posed by suburban types is therefore "because we feel threatened”. According to the IFS, households towards the top of the earnings range saw the lowest disposable income growth between 1997 and 2006, after the very poor were excluded. The biggest gains were in the uppermost 5 per cent. In other words, the working class were catching up with the bourgeoisie, whom the wealthy were outpacing. Professionals may feel relatively poorer while becoming richer in absolute terms.

Their insecurity would be greatest in southern England, where they are concentrated alongside an intimidating crowd of the seriously loaded. Such status symbols as big houses, nannies, private schools and golf club memberships are expensive down south. "If you earn 50,000, you will live like a lord in Leeds, but like a yeoman in London,” says Charlie Elphicke, of the CPS. "The Coping Class is a London thing. You don't hear people from Manchester moaning that they can't afford to live in Cheadle Hulme.”

According to claims from trust experts and shipping bodies, rich foreigners would flee the UK in droves if the government taxed them more heavily. This could reduce the vigour of the economy. The paradox is that many better-off Britons would feel more prosperous if the parvenus decamped. Envy is a terrible thing. But politically useful, as the chancellor no doubt calculates.