This is the kind of article that really has me spitting feathers

[emkana]

how awful not to be able to afford school fees and foreign holidays

"Let's assume the middle class family has a combined income of £100000" - who are these people?

grrr

ooh WWW - it isn't often I disagree with you but I'm going to have to on the £100K annual income not being that much! I think £100K annual income is waaaay higher than the average. I agree it probably doesn't cover 'normas great houses in London but then you probably need lots of inherited wealth these days to live in zones 1 - 3... But £100K a year would certainly ensure I had the nice kind of middle class life she's talking about - in Manchester!!

This article is absoltuely outragous (although, for some strange reason I found it also utterly hilarious, lol...)...poor woe her then...yeah, my heart bleeds for you!
Funny enough when she came to the part of just out of date food at waitrose I thought the same as many here...don't shop there then, lol!
This woman is just sooo pathetic and obviously doesn't appreciate what she has.

WWW...100K not that much....ok London is overpriced...but there is a solution to that...don't live there then, lol!

we would live like lords here in bham on 100k.

am pmsl at this, I just keep coming back to it

"Let?s assume the middle-class family has a combined income of £100,000, which is £60,000 after tax"

well you can see her point, really, can't you?

"Here we are in 2007, 20 years on, with tuition fees and have-yachts, and the only chaps who can possibly afford the Buller today are not the sons of the English gentry or the privately educated products of middle-class, middle-income homes, but the sons of Russian oligarchs and hedge fund managers. I rest my case"

pmsl still further

Sorry, I knew I'd regret posting that! I'm very happy for lots of people to disagree with me

WWW - don't apologise! I just can't see that there are many households where either 1 person earns £100K, or both earn £50K, which is still a good salary for a full-time person, but not many households have 2 full-time working people earning £50K.

Sigh... I should have become a doctor (shame I can't stand blood - am an NHS manager and have been having to read stuff this weekend which mentions "wounds" - makes my toes go all funny..! ).

www lol...so, do you really feel then that 100K a year isn't all that much?

Is it the case that whereas middleclass people might be worse off than 30 years ago, society as a whole is better off?

I ask, because in South Africa, where I grew up, the middleclass of my youth (i.e. white people) definitely find it harder now, but overall, things have improved. It?s just that wealth of a minority spread over the majority does not equal everyone living like the minority used to.

The article made me angry too ? it?s almost cruel to allow someone with so little grasp of how the majority of people live express themselves in public.

I don't know about society as a whole. We were poor, and my parents were both working class and grew up poor, but the poverty of ambition, the despair, the lack of education and the violence on the streets of SE London really scares me.

Do you think Rachel Johnson has heard of things called "state schools"?

Oh, my goodness, the price of ART today... Stupid bint needs a smack.

er..with www on the hundred grand thing..>

£60k for a family of four, in London, AND to be 'comfortable' isn't as much as it may at first sound, even sans school fees...

and Ididn't really appreciate the relative cost of being everso middle class now as compared to the baby-boomer generation's children...

not that she isn't a bubble-residing twunt, still. {best slip that one in emocion].

And who said "zeigeist" FGS??!! Are you a refugee from the Grauniad??

Solution to expensive housing in London "Don't live there!"

Ah, yes, silly me...

So DH and I should both get new jobs at the same time and move away from our family and friends?

'But I still think it is interesting that the lives of middle class people (gp, vicar, teacher, bank manager) in books from not so long ago is now only available to the very rich.'

I agree Aloha - that does seem to be true. Do we think house prices is the main culprit then?

DH and I don't earn anything like £100k combined, we live in west London (further out than Notting Hill, etc, but still well within the M25 and far enough in to pay London council tax rates!) - there's no WAY we could afford private school and until I went back to work full time, we struggled to afford food some months.

Now I'm back full time, and doing some overtime, we've sold our house and hope to move to a 3-bed semi with room to extend in the distant future (just seen one we love so fingers crossed - could do with some good luck vibes for tomorrow if anyone has any spare!).

But regular, expensive holidays and cleaners - do me a favour - no chance!

I think in London it is house prices, definitely.

We're about to borrow nearly 5 times joint salary - for the aforementioned 3-bed semi.

[scared]

The sad thing is that, under all the ghastly assumptions, sweeping generalisations and idiotic snobbery, there IS a decent point struggling to get out from that article.

Just about every couple DW & I know is working harder than their parents did in order to maintain an equal standard of living - or even a lower one.

In the city where we live, certain areas were ALWAYS the more middle-class ones - if you were a teacher or a doctor or a university lecturer, you just wouldn't dream of living outside those postcodes unless you were making a point. These days, terraced houses in those areas start at 180K, and two teachers,even with several years' experience, would be on no more than about 40K combined. Do the mortgage maths.

But the article is still pants. And worryingly, it shows Boris got all the brains in the family.

UQD, DH and I are definitely working more hours than my parents did, combined. We are not unusual in that within our peer group either. Yet they had a 4-bed house (in the same area we are buying - actually a better part of it), we always had a foreign holiday each year (although usually a gite or similar) and my mum was a SAHM with three of us.

Something's gone wrong somewhere, hasn't it?!

Ah, I read that too. She doesn't have a proper job so what does she expect? You pick these flimsy badly paid careers and you make the sacrifices that go with it and your children suffer too. You pick a job that pays enough to live well in London and you're okay. Her choice. And she packed off a son to board at 10 I think which presumably frees her up to earn more money. But I think her husband might be seriously ill so let's keep some sympathy.

I don't think people "pick" their careers as often as you might wish, Xenia.

that is scary!!!

Btw - what you suggested (tongue in cheek though of course!) is exactly what dh and I did. We both moved from London to Manchester at the same time (well, about 6m apart actually), he moving away from all his family and friends, not such an issue on that front for me admittedly.

Not suggesting for one moment that anyone should 'just move out of London - life is just not that simple is it?! But, my God, what a difference moving made to our standard of living. HUGE.

And if everyone picks careers that enable them to live in London, Xenia, your bins won't be emptied, your streets won't be swept and your children's schools won't have teachers - and woe betide you if you need nursing care at any time.