Over the years the middle classes have been an easy target for derision. From Margo Leadbetter in The Good Life, to Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced Bouquet, of course), in Keeping Up Appearances, people from all walks of life have joined in the laughter.  But now the satire seems to have morphed into a lethal resentment.

In the latest round of middle income-bashing, the think tank Reform has produced a report which says that the middle class should lose all entitlement to benefits and welfare. They see the middle classes as a ‘poisonous’ breed who extract ‘their fair share’ of entitlement through ‘universal benefits and near-free higher education’, the last of which will make many students choke on their cornflakes, their latest overdue college bill pinned to their wall.

Reform is of the opinion that anyone who is middle class can look after themselves, and to them, this means earning over £15,000 a year. Yet this is sometimes not even enough to live on, particularly where living costs are high, such as in the South-East.

The welfare state was not intended to be like this. William Beveridge, in his famous 1942 report, stated that the ‘first fundamental principle of social insurance’ was that a ‘flat rate of insurance benefits’ should be paid ‘irrespective of the amount of the earnings’ the recipient enjoyed. Welfare arrangements should never ‘discourage voluntary insurance or personal saving’.

Taking away benefits for those earning over £15,000 a year would be a massive disincentive to work harder or for the unemployed to find work. Already, under the current system, the marginal net rate of tax at this income level is over 60% as tax credits are withdrawn, and these proposals will just make it more unattractive to work harder or try to improve one’s lot. Saving for the future will be a worthless exercise as they would disqualify you for most forms of assistance when times are tough.

But when people try to pay their own way without burdening the state’s resources, they still get branded as public enemies. The attack on the charitable status of private schools, whose £100 million of tax breaks saves the Treasury £3 billion in paying for children they would otherwise have to educate, appears perverse when all three political parties want to ‘cut’ public expenditure.

A background of stagnating middle-class real wages over the last few years, called ‘median wage stagnation’ in America, has not helped their situation either. Some see those between the super-rich and super-poor as being trapped in a ‘hamster wheel’, constantly having to pay off student loans, service mortgages and save for their retirement all at the same time whilst their income comes under constant pressure.

But why should we even care about those on middle incomes or whether Mrs Bouquet can afford to have Royal Doulton china?

Middle class-bashing does not make sense from an overall economic perspective. They have the highest propensity to save, but the failure to encourage this squirreling tendency has contributed to the depth of the recession.  More saving means more investment that leads to more growth; at the moment when boom turned to bust, the household savings ratio was in negative territory for the first time in fifty years, partly due to stagnating real wages.

The consequences of the corporate attack on the professions can be illustrated by the loss of the middle-class bank manager. In the 1970s a visit to the bank manager to ask for a loan was like a grown-up version of a nervous schoolboy being summoned to the headmaster’s study. There would be a searching interrogation to assess your ability to repay the loan. Now the interview is conducted by an unqualified call centre employee incentivised to sell you as much debt as possible, and until recently, you did not even need to have enough income to cover the repayments, the result of which was the current financial mess.

Even the survival of the social welfare system itself is reliant on the middle classes drawing some benefits from the system. If the middle classes received little from the state they would question why they should bother to pay for benefits the less advantaged enjoy. While deep cuts to welfare expenditure are needed to balance the books, it will not help the poor to burden them all on those in the middle rather than more evenly in society. Tony Benn once said that there would be revolution if the NHS, the holy cow of the welfare state, was abolished.  He was right; but it would be the middle, not the working classes, that would be at the front of the crowds storming the gates of Downing Street.