Letters: Peter Hitchens vs Nick Cohen, and the case against the middle class

Piggies in the middle

Sir: Your feature ‘The strange death of the middle class’ (24 August) assumes that young people who do not attend fee-paying schools cannot have access to the same opportunities as those who do. I attended my local comprehensive in the first decade of this century. Despite the variable teaching quality, I did well in exams, went on to a good university, and now work for an aerospace company. I can afford to rent a flat, go on holiday and save a little, all on an income not much higher than the average starting salary for a graduate. I have not inherited any money, nor did I receive any from my parents during university. If you work hard at school, study a useful degree, and don’t expect to walk into the lifestyle of a euro-billionaire, then the UK is a fine place for the young and middle class. The problem is more to do with inflated feelings of entitlement.
Matthew Jones
Bath

Sir: To a large extent, the British middle class grew out of a need to provide ‘back office’ administration to support the growth created by the entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution. It is an oft-overlooked fact that many incumbents of the House of Lords are the antecedents of those entrepreneurs. It appears to me that far from being the backbone of Britain, the middle classes have become the interceptors of wealth created by others. They expect their children to have a right to the same highly paid jobs in the selfsame areas. As I was told by a German friend of mine, who came to the UK to run a factory recently acquired by the privately owned engineering firm Bosch, ‘The quality of the British workforce is superb: it is the management that is smug, self-satisfied and distinctly third-rate.’
Nicky Samengo-Turner
Hundon, Suffolk