Will Britons cope with the fallout from a lost decade?

[Extract]

It’s still amazing how little many people understand about how poor so many families are in our country, relative to what other people think. That’s particularly a metropolitan misunderstanding. That’s still the case today, but it is also noticeable that there is starting to be a detail and rigour in the conversation about living standards that we haven’t seen before. I’m an optimist by nature, but it’s hard not to be a pessimist now. Even when the economy was steadily growing, before the financial crisis, a large swath of the country was not sharing in that growing prosperity. These households have since seen a fall in their income, the like of which we have never known in any of our lifetimes. The media and others are playing catch-up with the longer-term reality: many working families were experiencing tough times before anyone talked about the “squeezed middle”.

This article first appeared in The Observer