Far more than in other western European countries, if you are born poor in Britain, in a poor area,
the chances are that you will remain poor for the rest of your life. If you are born rich, in a rich area, the likelihood is that you will find a way – or will have ways come to you – to stay wealthy and privileged throughout your life, and your children will do the same. Advantage is hoarded by the privileged sticking close to those who are similarly privileged. There is a subtle collusion shared by both left and right to maintain the solidity of this structure, while continuing to deny it.
Research on economic inequality and its social ramifications has shown that those near the top of the earnings scale consistently underestimate how well-off they are in comparison to others. In 2009, the TUC created a “
Middlebritainometer”, allowing wage-earners to input their income and find out where theirs lay in relation to the average. It showed that richer people believed themselves to be far closer to the average than they really were. Those earning £35,000 a year, which in 2009 put them in the top 20% of UK earners, placed themselves an average of
26 percentage points lower than their actual position. This is how privilege becomes truly concentrated – through the systematic denial of the way economic, social and cultural capital works, by the very people who are hogging it. Such blanket denial serves to convince members of the middle class that, generation after generation, they have to tighten their grip on the advantages they have, because they are always at risk of losing them.
