Graduate pay is falling – and an aggrieved generation could join white-collar workers in supporting Reform UK

What does it mean to have a middle-class, white-collar professional job?

It used to feel like a promise, a guarantee of a life that might not always run smoothly but would at least be stable, verging sometimes even on smug. It probably meant a mortgage, the kind of job title that made people trust you, and a sense – especially for those who were not born into a middle-class life – of having reached safe harbour. You wouldn’t be rich, but you’d be comfortable. Perhaps just as important, given all success is secretly relative, you would know exactly where you stood: never top of the pile, but at least a reassuringly long way off the bottom. But what happens when those layers start collapsing into each other?

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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