The Rich Deny Themselves

There’s plenty of good sense in Neil O’Brien’s article on the “squeezed middle” in today’s Telegraph but this snippet helps explain a good deal of what’s baffling about British politics:

In fact, a recent YouGov poll for Policy Exchange found that eight out of 10 people believe they are in the middle 40 per cent of earners. Only 2 per cent of people believe they are in the top 30 per cent.

There are many ways of looking at it but among them is this: most people who pay anything up to £30,000 a year for their children to be educated do not think they’re amongst the wealthiest 30% of British earners. This is many things – astonishing, perhaps even grotesque – but it’s another reminder that, politically-speaking, the Tory obsession with how much income tax should be paid by people earning more than £150,000 a year is deaf and blind and dumb and much else besides.