You can't ignore the middle class forever
Student Loans, Doctors’ Strikes and the Return of Class Consciousness
Since the start of the year, there has been a flurry of political attention around student loans. While the post-2012 fee system and its inequities are hardly new news, they have seemingly gained new salience. While some of us have pointed out for a while that the fees operate as a tax that no one will cut, and that the rich can buy themselves out of, it has now seeped into the broader political consciousness.
The reasons offer some interesting insights into how politics works in this country. Partly, it is partisan opportunism. The current system was built by the coalition and further tweaked by the Conservatives. It is now, however, Rachel Reeves’ problem – so the right-wing press are more keen to pick it up with a stick. It also suits the anti-intellectual, and particularly the anti-Higher Education turn of the right-wing presses, to push this argument now. But there are other things at play.
The first is more practical. The first students to pay the fees are now in their early thirties. This grants the issue a particular relevance. The graduates who entered politics, think tanks, and the media are no longer just runners, assistants, or demurring junior employees. They have a little more heft to write the pieces they care about and to commission columns on issues affecting them. Thus, as a previous generation centred housing and childcare in the conversation, now the focus shifts to the student loan system.
The subjects of the system ageing into proper adulthood also change the focus. Most graduates are realistic about their finances. They expect to live in a mildly precarious way in their twenties. Save for those who jump directly into the highest paying professions, most expect crap housing, lowish wages, and months that are sometimes too long for their money. An extra government levy doesn’t change that equation much. In their thirties, expectations are somewhat different.
The first wave of high-fee graduates is now meeting the real demands of adulthood. They are getting married, buying houses, and having children – all of which are placing further financial demands on them. Furthermore, as their salaries rise with career progression, they are feeling the real bite of the fees scheme, with a perpetual high marginal tax rate that stings their income but is insufficient to pay down the debt. Much of this was already an issue for older graduates, but the fee change has worsened the situation further.
The matter goes beyond student loans. Graduate professionals have had a raw deal from British politics and are becoming increasingly aware of it. Wage stagnation since the financial crisis has blighted their whole working lives, and they are perhaps the biggest victims of wage compression. While graduate salaries in the early 2010s might have been 50-100% higher than minimum wage, the two are now converging. At the same time, frozen tax thresholds and the interaction of student loan repayments with income tax and National Insurance have produced marginal rates that would once have been associated with far higher earners. The result is a growing sense that advancement is penalised rather than rewarded.
Along with this, working conditions have worsened. The rise of technology has led to an “always on” culture, not just for managers, but from the moment you walk in the door. White-collar work has become more exacting and more pressurised. The costs of housing and childcare intensify this. The risk of stalled progression or redundancy is worse due to these demands on your income. There is less of a sense that you can coast at some future level.
Layered on top are housing markets that favour inherited capital over professional qualification, and childcare systems that assume a single high earner rather than two moderate ones. The old promise – work hard at school, take on the debt, join a profession, and you will secure a comfortable, steadily improving life – feels increasingly brittle. Meanwhile, political parties have baulked at these voters and alienated them through Brexit. There is a chance this evolves into a new political force, with the middle class rediscovering its class consciousness and becoming keener to reassert itself.
Arguably, the junior doctors’ strikes have acted as the vanguard of this. Doctors are both like and unlike the wider professional cohort. They are saddled with significant student debt and the high marginal taxes that result. They face similar pressures on housing and childcare, especially if they live in the Southeast. Their employment situation, however, is unusual. The NHS effectively operates as a monopsony employer, with wages determined by the government. Through the years of austerity, they were squeezed particularly hard, even compared to stagnation elsewhere. Yet as one of the few professions to be unionised, they can also fight back.
The result has been a surge of militancy in the BMA. Younger doctors have become more determined to fight for their own employment terms and pay, utilising the leverage they have from being able to walk out. They have become unafraid of saying, “We are highly educated, work hard, and deserve to be paid accordingly”. More bluntly, seeing a choice between being popular with the public and getting more money, they have chosen the latter, letting the government figure out the how and the why of where it comes from.
The doctors’ dispute is the most organised element of a wider recalibration. Graduate professionals feel frustrated with a system that has lured them in and let them down. A moderately good income was once enough to secure a foothold in the middle class: a house in a decent area, children without permanent financial strain, some scope for leisure and savings. Today, it often feels like a treadmill. Earnings rise on paper, but tax drag, student loan repayments, and escalating fixed costs absorb the gains. The result is not destitution, but something politically potent: insecurity among those who believed themselves secure.
For decades, Britain’s middle class did not see itself as a class. It was the assumed norm. It staffed the civil service, the NHS, universities, professional services firms, and the media. Its interests were rarely articulated because they were woven into the fabric of policy. When budgets tightened, it absorbed the squeeze with grumbling but without open revolt. This dynamic feels like it is changing.
Yet few in politics seem to care. The “squeezed middle” and the “just about managing” are phrases that have fallen out of favour. Neither the Conservatives nor the Labour Party seem interested in the votes of the professionals. Indeed, the political culture of the last decade or so has rejected them. Brexit was their big political loss, and since then, politicians have used it to treat white-collar workers as inauthentic cosmopolitans. Tories have turned their backs on young City workers, while Blue Labour tendencies on the left have eschewed public-sector workers in favour of a semi-mythical manual class, whose cultural preferences are treated as more authentic and whose economic grievances are presumed to carry greater moral weight. This is despite graduates becoming an increasingly decisive voting bloc.
This is not to say that graduate professionals are impoverished or powerless in absolute terms. They do, however, see themselves as underrepresented and underserved by the government. It partly explains the leftward drift of young people in the UK, with the hope that a more activist government might deliver for them. Younger professionals are beginning to think of themselves not as the background of politics, but as participants within it. They get little back from the government yet enjoy none of the security of the very rich above them.
The rise of AI threatens to intensify this. It remains to be seen whether white-collar jobs can be properly automated; if so, it would turn these issues into a crisis. A wave of unemployment across the middle classes would have huge social and financial impacts, the service equivalent of deindustrialisation. No political party seems to be intellectually grappling with this, or even the current stagnation in the grad job market, which may be its first wave. This further undoing of the graduate classes could push them towards greater political consolidation.
There is a sharper problem here. The middling professionals present the block towards the one obvious game changer in current British politics – tax rises. The great fiscal winners of the Cameron-Osborne years were earners at just above median income levels. The rising tax thresholds shifted British taxes more towards the highest earners. Brits who earn at or a bit above average are taxed less than their peers in other European nations. Tax nimbyism makes reform politically treacherous — and deepens the sense that this cohort is being asked to pay without being asked what it wants.
This is the tension at the heart of the young white-collar anger. Professionals feel squeezed, overtaxed and underserved. Yet in comparative terms, Britain’s tax system still leans heavily on very high earners, capital and stealth mechanisms rather than on broad-based middle-income taxation. The median British professional household pays less direct income tax than its German or Scandinavian equivalent, while expecting a similar level of public provision.
For the policy entrepreneurs, there are three obvious directions of travel. The first is that broadly occupied by the Greens, redirecting middle-earner ire upwards. Ignore the shift of Britain’s tax system towards higher income and push towards taxes on the assets of the wealthiest. It is politically appealing but hard to make work in practice. The same holds for the opposite approach: seriously slashing the state. This could lower the tax burden, and even allow something to be done about student loans, but it is almost inconceivable in an era of an ageing population. And besides, part of what rankles with these voters is that under Osbornomics, they get very little back for their taxes.
The harder political sell is the one Labour is already struggling to make – something akin to European social democracy. Increase taxes, especially on the middle to top deciles, and pay it back with improved services. This addresses issues like student loan debt, where graduates feel particularly put upon, but comes at the cost of higher levies across the board. It is something that British political culture has struggled to accept and would be painful to move towards.
The junior doctors’ strikes and the student loans debate reveal a subtle but important shift. The professional middle classes are no longer politically invisible. They are a group that feels economically strained, culturally discounted and fiscally central. Historically, the middle class stabilises systems when they believe the bargain works. When that belief erodes, they do not collapse into poverty — they organise. If the political class continues to defer the trade-offs it must eventually confront, it should not be surprised if this cohort begins to negotiate more assertively for itself.
