The savage response to our account of coping on a family income of £45,000 ignores the fact that in some parts of the UK, that doesn’t go far
Our story last week featuring a stay-at-home mother facing the loss of child benefit provoked a furious backlash from some readers. Her husband’s earnings, a little over the £44,000 higher rate tax threshold, placed her firmly among the very well-off, they said. The comments posted online became ever more savage, with an almost mob mentality taking over.
Our writer declared upfront that she knew the cuts she would have to make were hardly throwing her into serious poverty. But she dared suggest that an income just above the higher rate threshold could still leave you hard-up. Cue a vicious torrent of abuse from the sad and spiteful people who too often elbow aside reasonable debate on our comment boards.
I happen to think our writer was correct. What’s the average annual earnings for a male working in London? £35,000? £40,000? £45,000 even?
Wrong on all counts. The average earnings of the 1,371,000 males who live and work in London is £50,875. If you take the 838,000 in inner London, the average is £60,959. These figures are for the mean average (the total sum divided by the number of earners) rather than the median (the middle figure), and City bonuses distort the “mean” figure upwards, but it’s still an awful lot of earners on high numbers.
Outside London, the figures are, inevitably, lower. Average earnings for the 209,000 males working in Manchester are £35,186. In south Cambridgeshire, where our writer lives, the average is £39,659. “Median” and “mean” are far closer than in London.
So when our writer felt that her husband’s earnings didn’t exactly put her in the super-rich bracket, she was telling the plain truth.
These figures all come from the 2009 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) on the Office for National Statistics website. Have a look at your own borough. Mine (I’m from Hastings) is pretty low – it’s just £24,159.
Therein lies my point. In Hastings – and many other places – a salary of £45,000 does make its earner “well-off”. It enables the earner to comfortably buy a property and support a family. If a Hastings family on £45,000 moans about child benefit cuts, they are likely to elicit little sympathy.
But in Cambridgeshire and much of the south-east, a salary of £45,000 does not bestow on its recipients much of a sense of prosperity. They face mountainous mortgages to live there, and it’s no good saying “go and live in Hastings, then”. There aren’t any jobs there.
I don’t know where the mob that attacked our writer draw the line. I was left with the sense that unless you are at the door of the Victorian workhouse, you don’t know how lucky you are.
This week, the BBC’s Andrew Marr called much online commentary “too angry and too abusive. Terrible things are said online because they are anonymous…” Judging from the response to our story last week, I couldn’t agree more.
My email’s p.collinson@guardian.co.uk. So now give me a vicious online kicking. Anonymously, of course.
