![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/00034212-1038x778.jpg\")
\n Illustration by Dom McKenzie \/ Ikon Images<\/p>\n
\n Illustration by Dom McKenzie \/ Ikon Images<\/p>\n
A country in which a consumer rights\u2019 watchdog has become a national treasure clearly has something wrong with it. Martin Lewis\u2019s latest campaign focuses on student debt, with him labelling Rachel Reeves\u2019s adjustments to repayment rules \u201cnot a moral\u201d move. But this is just his latest rearguard action to defend a demographic from financial insecurity. His public affection has risen inversely to the immiseration of the general public, which is itself the result of some blunter economic trends (confirmed by the latest growth figures for the final quarter of 2025, a total of 0.1 per cent). Put another way, this a country where incomes fail to keep pace with costs, and the certainty of earning those incomes diminishes. In that equation, the toxic insecurity that smothers British life is revealed.<\/p>\n
Student loans are just our latest cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre. Currently, two thirds of graduates<\/a> are not meeting the loan interest due on their debts, which continue to accumulate. A graduate in work will need to earn<\/a> about \u00a366,000 a year to begin repaying their debt \u2013 enough to start losing their child benefit, which is reduced from \u00a360,000 before disappearing at \u00a380,000. At \u00a3100,000, support for nursery places begins to be withdrawn, creating the peculiar situation where a parent earning \u00a395,000 is likely to be better off than one on \u00a3140,000. This isn\u2019t anything like poverty but as universal benefits are withdrawn, the ability of younger earners with few savings or other assets to provide for their financial security is perversely reduced.<\/p>\n If it\u2019s hard to feel sympathy for graduates \u2013 bearing in mind that they\u2019re now a third of the population \u2013 it may or may not be reassuring to learn that the rest of the country is in a worse position. For the poorest, the last 15 years have been particularly hard, as a combination of austerity and then the pandemic hammered living standards. The National Institute for Economic and Social Research<\/a> has showed that the poorest 10 per cent of households saw their real incomes fall by an average of some \u00a34,600. The Universal Credit uplift in 2020, and then substantial increases in the National Living Wage over the following years cushioned some of this shock, but were not enough to absorb it. Latest official figures<\/a> show that, after price rises and taxes, average household incomes fell once again over 2025.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s the creep of this economic pain up the class system that is particular to the last two decades. This isn\u2019t the Eighties, when the middle class could be (and were) bribed with tax cuts. The student loan squeeze is part of a larger failure to reward aspiration, and the sharp decline in living standards at the bottom hides a deeper insecurity further up the income scale. New data shows<\/a> that a household earning up to \u00a360,000 in 2024 had a one-in-three chance of sinking into the poorest 40 per cent, and a one-in-ten chance of ending up in the poorest 20 per cent \u2013 and so quite likely falling, claim the researchers, below the poverty line. This instability arises from the increasing insecurity of employment. While unemployment has fallen pretty consistently since 2005, research by the think tank Autonomy<\/a> shows that employment insecurity has worsened by any measure, whether temporary contracts, unstable incomes or the spread of freelancing.<\/p>\n Subscribe to the New Statesman today for only \u00a31 a week.<\/p>\n Hospitality is the worst affected sector, but, strikingly, more traditionally \u201cmiddle class\u201d occupations like academia have also seen startling increases in employment insecurity. Whether it\u2019s junior lecturers or more-established academics, the response of universities to financial insecurity has been to push it downwards to their staff \u2013 and threatened redundancies at Essex, Sheffield and elsewhere are only the most painful example of the spread of precarity. To train as a doctor might once have been seen as a fast-track to middle class respectability; now, as the repeated strikes by resident doctors since 2016 demonstrate, the real pay and conditions of the recently qualified have eroded.\u00a0<\/p>\n When the economist Guy Standing coined the term \u201cprecariat\u201d back in 2011, he was addressing a minority. He estimated around a quarter of the population in the richer economies: living and working precariously, in short-term contracts, and without easy recourse to savings or other, public forms of social protection. Standing described them as the \u201cnew dangerous class\u201d, unmoored from traditional sources of social stability, whether work or community. In this context, the precariat could be susceptible to \u201cneo-fascism\u201d (in Standing\u2019s phrase) \u2013 or, alternatively, to transformative visions of social justice.<\/p>\n This volatile, growing \u201cdangerous class\u201d helps explain the great turmoil of the 15 years since he was writing. Societies across the world, in rich countries and poor, have been beset by waves of political and social unrest, from the Arab Spring to Occupy, and Brexit to Trump. The figure of the young, downwardly mobile graduate has become almost a clich\u00e9 by this point, whether sparking revolts in Cairo or campaigning for Bernie Sanders. But Standing rightly pointed to the insecurity not only of the young and educated, but that of another group: the older, asset-poor worker, who also has limited savings and also faces an unstable job market. A section of this latter demographic has since formed the social base for the modern radical right, from Maga to Reform.<\/p>\n Standing thought the precariat would continue to grow, fuelled by the destructive march of neoliberalism through the world\u2019s labour markets \u2013 employers cutting costs and switching stable, long-term employment contracts for the misery of insecure work. The reality over the last decade, despite rhetorical guff from governments claiming to be prioritising workers, is that growing numbers in the richer economies find themselves pushed further into forms of precarity.<\/p>\n There are progressive solutions to this. But they stretch well beyond what the Westminster parties would find acceptable. We are approaching the point where the only fair solution to student debt is a generalised write-off. Universal childcare was one of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u2019s top five pledges in last year\u2019s election \u2013 and he has already taken steps to implement it, citywide. And basic income could provide a robust form of fundamental security by making guaranteed payments to all.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/dl6pgk4f88hky.cloudfront.net\/2021\/09\/TNS_master_logo.svg\"){kind=logo}
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