By Madeleine Bunting

Reprinted from THE GUARDIAN

Public opinion can sometimes shift suddenly, and a new consensus emerge with striking force as familiar details are re-ordered, rather as a kaleidoscope makes a new pattern. That's what is happening now: inequality has been the lonely preserve of hoary class warriors worried about child poverty for much of the past decade. No longer. Inequality has shifted to the centreground of politics; it has been propelled there not, however, by a sudden outbreak of social conscience worried by poverty in the UK, but by the increasingly powerful sense of grievance of middle England.

If you want to understand this gathering storm, check out the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Spectator - even Tatler. You could see it in the coverage last week of the private equity bosses hauled up before the Commons select committee to defend their paltry tax returns, or the news reports that "non doms", those resident but not domiciled in the UK, don't pay stamp duty.

"It's not fair" is the indignant cry, and out tumbles a self-pitying litany of dispossession and deprivation. The middle classes, normally a bastion of effortless entitlement, are feeling very hard done by. It's the struggle to scrape together the half a million required for a modest south-east house with some cash spare to pay the childcare; the scramble for a half-decent school; the prospect of pathetic pensions; and the impossibility of easing their own children's university debts, let alone their entry into the London housing market. These last, assistance to the next generation, were key to how the middle class reproduced itself so successfully - but no longer.

Never have the middle classes looked so rich on paper - house values topping a million - and felt so poor. As Lloyd Evans put it in a Spectator column last month after buying his first house: "In theory, we're halfway to being millionaires. Yet we don't have a car, we can barely afford a holiday, and when we go for a drink, we sit on the green outside the pub, quaffing Tesco £2.99 Frascati to save money."

What's slowly dawning on middle England is that they've been duped: they were sold a line - a "fair deal for hard-working families"; meanwhile, another very different scenario was unfolding. Britain became the world's billionaire playground, attracting the super-rich with such a generous tax regime that in April the IMF went so far as to define the City of London as effectively a tax haven. The wealth of Britain's top 1,000 has quadrupled since 1997 and the rate of growth is now spiralling out of control - a massive 20% jump in the past year. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have happily presided over an unprecedented golden age of wealth accumulation in this country - on a par with the US in Gatsby's Roaring Twenties.

Yet the protests have been oddly muted - until now. Except for complaints about soaring executive pay from dogged critics, there has been a peculiar tolerance of Britain's super-rich elite's mushrooming wealth. Why hasn't Brown had the roasting he deserves for being so pusillanimous about closing the tax loopholes that enable these billionaires to pay less tax than their cleaners? Why was it left to a fully paid-up member of the super-rich, Sir Ronald Cohen, to warn that the widening gulf of inequality could lead to riots in the streets?

This bizarre tolerance is revealing: huge wealth is now regarded as a fabulous spectator sport and massively enviable. It is also, most importantly, regarded as legitimate - the global economy is akin to a vast lottery, some just get lucky. The "winner takes all" has become a respectable formula of economic life, not evidence of a systemic injustice. Any other view is dismissed, in that derogatory phrase, as the "politics of envy". Peter Mandelson summed it up in 1998 with a magnificent use of adjectives: "We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich."

The wealth may be obscene but the means of achieving it are presumed, naively, not. This wealth is perceived as victimless - not achieved at the expense of someone else's exploitation, but as a product of the near mystical vagaries of global stock markets. To still any incipient protest, the Treasury championed the claim that this wealth benefited Britain - it resorted to that widely discredited fiction of the Thatcherite years, that wealth trickles down. No Treasury review has ever attempted to prove this economic benefit to the country; this is an issue on which myths abound.

But the worm has turned. What "trickle down" means is massive inflation in the London housing market - which, in turn, drives the entire nation's housing market. Prices are being sharply skewed by an elite who are prepared to pay ludicrous money, and, insult to injury, manage to evade stamp duty - that bete noire of the property-obsessed - by transferring ownership of the property to an offshore company (another tax dodge). What infuriates the middle classes is not just the injustice, but that they are now priced out of the neighbourhoods they grew up in, and forced into near-unmanageable mortgages to cling on - hence the cheapo Frascati, taking your own lunch into work, the love of Ikea, Primark and Lidl.

Some of you old class warriors will be saying poor diddums to the middle-class whingers who are still doing substantially better than the hefty, and increasing, chunk of the population living in absolute poverty - now running at 7.4 million. But don't scorn such useful allies; if the "hard-working families" of middle England can be recruited to campaign for a hike in tax rates for the rich (say, those with annual incomes over £100,000) and closure of tax loopholes, Brown might actually do something.

The charge sheet is being assembled. A super-elite rachets up social comparisons, leaving everyone lower down the pecking order disgruntled - the US economist Robert Frank argues that the relationship between inequality and lower rates of happiness is now well established. His new book, Falling Behind, examines the phenomenon in the US, where the middle classes are now working harder than ever to pay exorbitant mortgages on incomes that have stagnated while the wealth of the super-rich has ballooned. "Richistan" is another country, argues a Wall Street reporter assigned to cover the subject full-time in 2003: private banking, private planes, private health and education. And it's a country stuffed full of absurd opulence - watches worth hundreds of thousands, but hey, why stop at one, what about a "watch wardrobe"?

We are as ghoulishly gripped by Richistan as if we were watching a car crash - and that's exactly what it is. A slow-motion catastrophe: an elite, however small, with this kind of immense wealth has a hugely disproportionate impact, skewing the whole frame of reference in a society of value, worth and status - which are all human needs basic to dignity and wellbeing. The super-rich are poison to the body politic, racheting up social tensions - most acutely in London, the global capital of Richistan - and those tensions, tragically, play out on the streets not of Belgravia but in the poorest neighbourhoods.

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