Poverty in Blair's Britain?
This article will either make you indescribably angry, or make you laugh for hours:
Chris Proud and his wife Lorraine should be sitting pretty. The 41-year-olds have a combined income of more than £100,000. He is an accountant and she is a chef who runs her own business catering for executive events and weddings.
They live in an £800,000 detached four-bedroom home in West Sussex with their son William, 12, and nine-year-old daughter Emily. Like many other families, however, they are feeling the squeeze. Their cost of living is rising sharply and they are having to cut back.
“Both our children go to private school and the fees have risen above inflation for the past 10 years,” said Chris. Rising gas and electricity bills, the January hike in train fares, higher council tax and increases in other taxes are adding to the pressure on the family finances. The couple have a fixed-rate mortgage but are not looking forward to the time when it has to be renewed.
“Now we go on only one holiday a year rather than two. My wife is is having to do more functions to keep the balance. We are just having to be a bit more careful and forgo certain things such as fixing things around the house and around the garden. Car insurance has gone up and when my wife is working in London she has to pay the congestion charge.”
Are we supposed to feel sorry for them? Laugh at them for not living in the real world? What? They've progressed from being better-off than everyone else ten years ago to being ten years ago now. Shall we have a whip-round, see if we can get them on that second foreign holiday of theirs?
I'll just settle for shaking my hand angrily at the computer screen.
Cory
From Fisking Central via Inner West
