The poorer you are, the easier it is to become trapped in this systemSometimes it takes a casual phrase to really reveal the gap between a slice of our ruling class and the rest of us.The Tory frontbencher Alan Duncan says that living on £64,000 a year - which puts him in the richest 4 per cent of the population - means a life on "rations", and "no one who's done anything" will want to live on it. Boris Johnson says wages for a second job of £250,000 are "chicken feed", even though they are more than what 99.99 per cent of us earn. (He must have an army of gargantuan chickens). David Cameron doesn't even know how many houses he owns, and his heiress wife says a windfall of up to £250,000 from selling a property is "nothing life-changing". Yet out in the real Britain, the median wage is £23,000 a year. Half earn more; half earn less. Underneath this figure, there's another: the average personal debt is £29,500. As individuals, we owe more than we earn in a year. This is a relatively recent development, and it happened for an underlying structural reason. Since the early 1980s, average incomes have stagnated, even as the economy - and people's expectations - have continued to grow. How is this possible? Under Thatcher and (alas) her New Labour successors, for the first time since the 1920s, growth went almost entirely to those at the top. People like Boris and former oilman Duncan saw their real incomes soar - and shoot off far beyond everyone else. So to keep up, the middle class and the poor turned to credit. They stayed with the rising tide by building a life-raft out of credit cards and personal loans.
Sometimes it takes a casual phrase to really reveal the gap between a slice of our ruling class and the rest of us.
The Tory frontbencher Alan Duncan says that living on £64,000 a year - which puts him in the richest 4 per cent of the population - means a life on "rations", and "no one who's done anything" will want to live on it. Boris Johnson says wages for a second job of £250,000 are "chicken feed", even though they are more than what 99.99 per cent of us earn. (He must have an army of gargantuan chickens). David Cameron doesn't even know how many houses he owns, and his heiress wife says a windfall of up to £250,000 from selling a property is "nothing life-changing".
Yet out in the real Britain, the median wage is £23,000 a year. Half earn more; half earn less. Underneath this figure, there's another: the average personal debt is £29,500. As individuals, we owe more than we earn in a year. This is a relatively recent development, and it happened for an underlying structural reason.
Since the early 1980s, average incomes have stagnated, even as the economy - and people's expectations - have continued to grow. How is this possible? Under Thatcher and (alas) her New Labour successors, for the first time since the 1920s, growth went almost entirely to those at the top. People like Boris and former oilman Duncan saw their real incomes soar - and shoot off far beyond everyone else. So to keep up, the middle class and the poor turned to credit. They stayed with the rising tide by building a life-raft out of credit cards and personal loans.
Under Thatcher and (alas) her New Labour successors, for the first time since the 1920s, growth went almost entirely to those at the top. People like Boris and former oilman Duncan saw their real incomes soar - and shoot off far beyond everyone else. So to keep up, the middle class and the poor turned to credit. They stayed with the rising tide by building a life-raft out of credit cards and personal loans.
