The children of affluent and working-class parents alike can no longer expect home ownership, job security or a decent salary
The great decline of the British middle class is as stark as it is little discussed. A year ago, Labour’s losses in the so-called red wall seemed to emphasise a historic collapse in its relationship with those described as the party’s “traditional, working-class” base. In the election campaign itself, the psephologist Sir John Curtice said that Labour was “no longer a party of the working class. [It’s] a party of young people”.
It is not to disparage his polling expertise to point out that treating “the working class” and the “young” as separate categories is somewhat puzzling. It is more accurate to describe a collapse of the middle class among the young: the “proletarianisation” of a generation, to use a particularly catchy phrase.
