Afterword: ‘I spoke to a lady from Godalming…’

In March 2024, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, said:

‘I spoke to a lady from Godalming about eligibility for the government’s childcare offer which is not available if one parent is earning over £100k. That is an issue I would really like to sort out after the next election as I am aware that it is not [a] huge salary in our area if you have a mortgage to pay.’

Jeremy Hunt is not a socially aware person. That can be ascertained from the majority of the comments he has made in public since becoming a politician. He may be unusually unaware. But this particular comment was especially telling because it came at a time when Britain was experiencing its longest pay squeeze since the one that began in 1798. In fact, this comment was made on the day the British government released this country’s worst-ever statistics on poverty. They recorded the sharpest-ever rise in poverty, especially among children. Given how Hunt thinks, I doubt I have the teaching ability to explain to him why his observations were so very tone-deaf. At the same time, they reveal how many extremely well-off people in Britain think.

Lack of awareness among the elite is among our most urgent problems in Britain, and one which has only become more relevant since the hardback edition of this book was published last year. We live in a society where people in the top 1% of earners, like Hunt, mostly only ever meet people from the top 10%. When Hunt looks down, he sees someone on £100,000, treats them with pity and talks of how he can understand their plight. Those of us in the top 10% tend to look up more than we look down.

Jeremy Hunt was a student in my hometown when I was a schoolboy. I often came across his kind of people and so I got to see just how unaware they were when they were young; I also had pity for boys like him who had never been allowed to mix with other classes and who were afraid to walk the streets of Oxford because they might be set upon by the lower orders.

There are times when it appears that almost everything is changing. Now might well be one of those times, because there is little respect left in Britain today for ‘our betters’. Hunt’s comments were greeted with derision. Even the Labour Party – who, in 2024, are desperately trying to be like the Tories – derided him. Labour has said there is not enough money for more than two children in any family to receive child benefits, ensuring many children would remain poor if they live with more than one sibling. Labour also promised to crack down on the ‘workshy’ and find a way to ‘stop the boats’. Despite all this, it was still able to describe Hunt as ‘“desperately out of touch” with the lives of ordinary people.’ Nevertheless, Labour in 2024 remains wary, presenting itself as the party of the top 10% – that is, the political party of sensible managers of the lives of the poor, and friends of big business.

If you were to indicate that you were a single person living alone and typed ‘£41,000’ into the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) household income calculator, it would tell you that, ‘With a household after tax income of £805 per week, you have a higher income than around 90% of the population – equivalent to about 59.8 million individuals.’ That data, in the 2024 IFS online calculator, relates to 2022. In 2022, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was paid £159,038 per year. For someone like Hunt, such a sum of money is peanuts, given his ‘private interests’ (don’t ask – his businesses are none of your business).

No wonder Hunt said, ‘I am aware that it is not [a] huge salary in our area…’. We are all aware only of what we have experienced, what we have been told, what we understand and what we have thought about. The concerns and desires of the best-off 10% of people is detailed in this book in a way that helps us understand their fears, hopes and wishes.

This book combines careful quantitative and qualitative evidence to show why the best-off are yet to be convinced that their take is disproportionate, or that their taking so much causes huge problems for others. As explained in great detail, the top 10% rely on public services as much, if not more, than everyone else. Without public (charity) higher education, for example, their businesses could not function, their children would not be educated and their lives would be less enriched. They are also the group who make by far the greatest use of public health services because they live the longest and are least likely to die a quick death; they end up having the highest number of co-morbidities. If those of us in the top group thought a little more about what our final year of life could be like, we might wish for a more equitable future. We are very likely to be cared for by people in the lowest 10% pay band in care homes (our successful children having migrated far away).

Since first publication, this book has received widespread media attention, with headlines such as ‘Why are Brits on £180k so sad?’ and ‘Why a six-figure salary no longer means you’re rich’ showing us why we need to pay attention to the woes of high earners in the fight against inequality. However, publications like the New Statesman and The Telegraph, in which these headlines appear, almost never explain why living in a country that is so unequal makes the best-off among us so unhappy.

The groups that people like me sometimes label the ‘hoping to be well-off’ (university students who are better off than most other university students), the ‘actually affluent’ (young adults who think their salary is low), the ‘slightly rich’ (older adults who have much more wealth than most people their age) and the ‘very greedy’ (most of the 1%) are much more sympathetic to issues such as racial inequality and gender inequality than they are to income and wealth inequality. They have been taught to believe they are ‘worth it’. These five groups include, when polled, the majority of British university students and their parents, who think they should be paid much more than others because of the hard work they put into their university degrees – or perhaps, in some cases, because they think they are more able and valuable than those on lower incomes. In the UK, many university students believe they should be in the top 10%. As of 2024, a majority of young people go to university in the UK.

A final thought. Could people who are actually in the top 10% think of their future grandchildren or great-grandchildren, or their great-nieces and nephews? And think of the one who has had the least luck in life, who is ill on the day of an exam, whose marriage falls apart, who starts a business the year before a recession? Rising up into the top 10% is as much a matter of luck as falling down out of it. And no one makes their own luck. Even if you do not give a damn for anyone you are not related to, a more equitable future society will protect both you in your old age and your family long after you are dead. The alternative is not just inequitable – it is ignorant.

Danny Dorling
University of Oxford
April 2024

For a PDF and where originally published click here.

Jeremy Hunt in Haslemere on July 5 2024. Photographer: Jason Alden/Bloomberg