BY STEWART SLATER

Britain is, as Napoleon may or may not have said, a “nation of shopkeepers”. Partly this may have been down to snobbery – nations which have felt the need to invent a caste system have generally accorded a lower ranking to merchants than to soldiers. But le petit caporal (or whoever invented the phrase) put his finger on something important. For the word he used was “boutiquiers” which we could also render as “businessmen” or “merchants”. It was not shop-workers Napoleon was worried about, it was shop-owners.

And he was right to be so. For while it was the playing fields of Eton which produced Britain’s officers, it was her middle classes who harnessed the Industrial Revolution and developed its economy. The Battle of Waterloo may have been “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life” but the growth Britain’s boutiquiers produced ensured it was the last time for a century that France could reasonably attempt to take on perfidious Albion. It was her merchants and businessmen, developing and exploiting new technologies and markets, who produced the wealth which allowed the country to bestride the world like a colossus.

But if the middle class did so much to build Britain, the time has come to ask whether they are now intent on destroying it. For, enquire into any of the country’s major problems and, like Moriarty in Conan Doyle’s “The Final Problem”, you will find their fingerprints.

For much of the country’s recent history, political instability has been something which happened abroad. Britain sailed serenely on, power passing from centre-left to centre-right and back again with reasonable regularity and everyone accepted the result. But then Brexit happened. A howl was issued across the land as millions of Waitrose shoppers realised that the plebs had taken away their much loved, if rarely used, right to free movement. Failing to find a manager to complain to, they did the next best thing. They took to the streets, focaccia sandwiches securely stowed in North Face backpacks, and demanded that they get their way. When that didn’t work, 51% of them voted for parties committed not to implement the largest democratic result in the country’s history, no matter how extreme the leader. It turned out that playing by the rules was only important if those rules gave you the desired result.

Beyond Brexit, it is a truth universally acknowledged that the country’s housing market is broken. The average age at which people buy a first house is now 33, a rise of 4 years over the past decade. In a normal market, as demand rises (from a growing population), supply grows to meet it, but the laws of economics are as nothing compared to the vested interests of British society. For building homes is remarkably difficult, with developments regularly blocked by NIMBYs petitioning councils. There may, in some cases, be good environmental reasons to restrict development, but with 92% of the country unbuilt on, that argument only gets us so far. In other cases, campaigns seem to be motivated more by the desire to protect existing homeowners from the inconvenience of having more neighbours, and the dread fear of declining property prices.

For the mere suggestion that they might stop going up is enough to prompt a fit of the vapours similar to those suffered by the most delicate Victorian lady. Current rising interest rates and their likely impact on mortgages have prompted calls for a government package to support homeowners even though prices have yet to decline. Little thought is given to the fact that interest rates have been unsustainably low for over a decade. Those who would sneer at the Bitcoin Bros who piled into the digital currency/ponzi scheme at $60,000 seem to believe interest rates should be set at levels so that their similarly aggressive bet that funding would remain unprecedentedly cheap for the entirety of their mortgages comes off or that they should be compensated for it if it does not.

The result of the elevation of the property market to the NHS’s only realistic rival as a national religion is that preserving housing wealth has joined defending the realm as a key objective of government policy. At the time of writing (and those who have been watching the news will realise this is a moving target), two of policies from the Truss/Kwarteng Budget for the Ages/Financial Disaster of Epic Proportions which survive relate to protecting the middle class’s favourite asset – the Stamp Duty cut (which experience suggests serves mainly to juice prices) and the reduction in National Insurance rates. The latter reverses the previous government’s decision, in a rare bout of Johnsonian fiscal prudence, to raise them as part of a new Social Care Levy, designed to cover the costs of the manifesto pledge that no-one would need to sell their house to pay for care. The result of the change is that whereas Profligate Boris was attempting to claw back some of the benefit he extended to homeowners, Prudent Jeremy has just handed them a bung amounting to 0.25% of GDP annually.

But while these policies may give the sugar rush of another dinner party spent boasting about house prices, their longer term effect is more insidious. Cutting Stamp Duty raises demand, while the Social Care policy reduces supply, making it harder for the young to buy. As numerous wags have asked, why will the youth be conservative if they have no wealth to conserve? More broadly, they hold the country back. London and the South East are the most productive parts of the country, but also the most expensive places to live. Keeping house prices high keeps talented people out of the capital, making us all poorer. So dire is the situation that the capital is even running out of laboratory space. The Oxford-Cambridge Arc could link the two great Universities and unlock the knowledge they share, but it, like countless other productive projects, never gets built because NIMBYs say no. This may appear a theoretical question to the currently comfortable but, with an ageing population, absent improved growth, how do they expect the country to look after them?

But if many of the middle classes merely wish to pull up the (property) ladder once they have climbed it, others prefer to burn it down entirely. For look, if you can bear it, at any of the Just Stop Oil/Insulate Britain/whatever they are calling themselves this week brigade, and two demographic groups appear. One is retired professionals, high on a lifetime of self-regard, and the other is their grandchildren, graduates of the country’s higher quality schools and lower quality universities. It matters not that their views go leagues further than anything which might be termed science, or that they have been rejected at every ballot box save that in Brighton. They are right, and the world had better do what they want, no matter what the cost to others. It doesn’t matter if the working classes cannot get to work, or die in an ambulance stuck in a traffic jam, it is for their own good.

But if the eco-loons, in their yurts and veganism politics, are the most extreme manifestation of the middle classes, they are also, in their insistence that the world do what they want, its purest representatives. For those at the bottom of the heap do not expect society to obey their wishes and those at the top do not need it to as they are confident they will thrive no matter what. It is those who think the world can bend to their will, and fear the consequences if it does not, who are most vocal about promoting and defending their interests. But those interests may not align with broader society. Nor may they, in the longer run, even be good for those who espouse them. A society increasingly dedicated to middle class welfare by giving them what they want today risks stagnation and decay tomorrow. Better for its beneficiaries to remember that the greatest loss can be the greatest gain.

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.