Perhaps it’s down to upbringing, maybe it’s a fault in their education: for whatever reason, struggling high earners are apt to be their own worst advocates.
Assuming the financial pain is as severe as some are claiming, you wonder if they wouldn’t do better to invite cameras and a celebrity, following in the footsteps of Matthew Parris and Michael Portillo, to join their community and experience what life’s really like on a salary of £100,000, even £200,000 a year.
Then viewers could see for themselves what it is to tell the kids they can’t go skiing, to not replace three-year-old cars, to stop heating a pool or cut down on other luxuries wealthier families can still take for granted. Yes, poverty safaris are wrong and no visitor can hope, in a week, to plumb the depths, but if Down and Out in Windsor and Salcombe is the only hope of public understanding, so be it.
Until then, with limits to available compassion in a cost of living crisis, rich complainants will find themselves competing for sympathy against the more observably deserving poor. Historically, this may have gone pretty well, but a generally callous response to recent comments by Jeremy Hunt, about constituents struggling on £100,000, indicates increased difficulty for the high salaried trying to be heard, above the clamour about food banks, on problems such as unsubsidised childcare, higher taxes on second homes and the coming agony of private school VAT. Last week, some Times readers had to be reminded, when a “livid” mother of two in a double-lawyer household earning over £200,000 raged lengthily about the cost of childcare, that it’s only poor women who should be asked why, if they can’t afford kids, they were careless enough to have any. It probably made sense to her. And the author was no more guilty than many of her peers in failing to conceal what the philosopher Michael Sandel calls “meritocratic hubris”.
To be fair to the more entitled, self-pitying and tone-deaf representatives of the professional managerial class, there has probably never been a worse time to explain why you have an inalienable right to, say, a second home. They may even be struggling to comprehend, after years in which poorer residents have been cleared from the most picturesque rural and coastal zones, with only occasional protests about vacant properties, how little their occasional spend in local Spars has been appreciated.
Then there is the challenge of explaining why this demographic deserves levels of protection and subsidy not available to lesser earners no longer able to afford an amenity. True, people on over £100,000 a year have always – outside the pages of the Telegraph, the Times, the Daily Mail, the Express, Sun and Spectator – faced obstacles, in comparison with the technically unfortunate, to being considered deserving. But even so, from such a fluent and meritorious campaigning group, it’s concerning to find the case for special treatment being so counterproductively made. Where did they all go to school?
Some recent special pleading from second-home owners – as in, they’re actually poor, they’re doing the countryside/local community a massive favour – could have been composed by unusually resourceful Trots. Along with hyperbolic headlines about “raids” or “attacks” on taxpayers, another common objection to affluence-depleting charges, that of being “taxed twice”, could be advanced by anyone buying a can of beer out of taxed income.
To be sure of alienating the formerly indifferent reader, there is nothing, however, like arguing that wealthy targets of long overdue taxes should enjoy a sort of moral immunity. They have “worked hard” for their privileges, shown “aspiration”, made “sacrifices” – or what less heroic consumers might think of as not buying things. Anyone who supports additional taxes is an exponent, on the other hand, of the “politics of envy”.
In a classic of the genre, TalkTV journalist Isabel Oakeshott, owner of “a little place on the Isle of Wight” – and a credit to Gordonstoun – once invited Telegraph readers to walk a mile in her shoes. Increased taxes, she wrote, will never work being “based on a complete misunderstanding of the psychology of second-home owners, many of whom already make huge sacrifices to hold on to their special places because they are such a source of wholesome pleasure”. Many people, she added, will just “do what they did in order to afford the property in the first place, and work harder”.
In contrast to rival claims to consideration from people pointing out they can’t afford anything as special as food, heat or rent, the scale of these sacrifices is often obscure. Are they huge enough to include that certified marker of profligacy, avocado toast? Is the alternative of a rented holiday cottage or state school necessarily worse? If Oakeshott knows people who’ve sold a kidney to keep a second home, apologies are of course in order. But given how often the sacrifice turns out, when specified, to be comically manageable, her vagueness is understandable.
“We do without fancy holidays, clothes and meals out to pay for it,” one parent shares on a website created by a recently formed private school parents’ group, “Education not Taxation”. Long before the threat of VAT, private school fees had soared above inflation, becoming increasingly impossible for all but the wealthiest. So it was possibly shortsighted for – inevitably – “hard-working parents” to wait until Labour’s proposed removal of VAT exemption to protest that rising fees endanger, as well as the wellbeing of poorer pupils and the equilibrium of a state system forced to take in refugees, the very existence of some schools. But even if this were (contrary to predictions) plausible, the response might be disappointing. Successive surveys indicating majority support for VAT in private school fees suggest the public could not care less.
And if the afflicted sector can’t teach even their most able product to control meritocratic hubris, the public probably has a point.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
