County Court Judgment Day - The Revenge of a Bankrupt Middle Class?

Today's papers were leading with some good strong negative worry pieces on the slowdown (read, meltdown) of housing prices outside London and the rise in County Court Judgments
as up to 1 million UK households face court action over debts, lured by the siren call of easy credit to the tune of a whopping £1.3 trillion.

The piece states that

figures showed that many ordinary families are now affected by serious financial problems - even though they may not be on the brink of insolvency.

The truth of the matter is that most households have no idea how to manage without living on the never never. With the only solution to the intractable supply and demand of housing in areas of the country people wish to live in being the long slow demographic slide a la Russe, awaiting expectantly the demise of the baby-boomer generation for whom home ownership was another nice smug adornment to life rather than the be all and end all it is now, the question of why suffer this increasingly law of diminishing returns for human happiness must be posed.

What force of ingrained middle class rectitude keeps the coping classes (read Alice Thompson's excellent Torygraph piece on the bulging ranks of middling managers who keep the rich truly rich and the poor truly poor to the life conditions they expect)
beset as they are from increasing taxes without any growth in quality of public services, incessantly rising interest rates and cost of living, driven into less salubrious affordable habitations (non white Russian flight from Chelsea to Putney) from abandoning their serfdom and embracing, well, embracing a life of freedom and possibilities?

JG Ballard's recent works 'Millennium People and 'Kingdom Come' again shed that remarkable author's compassionate gaze on that aberrant and unhappy breed of men, the English middle and lower middle classes. In the former book, residents of a gated community in West London decide to strike out against their oppressors, the smothering inanities of middling England, bombing Tate Modern, sabotaging Cat of the Year show in Olympia, storming Broadcasting House before the authorities cow them to return to their bourgeois burdens of finding money to pay school fees and change to pay the meter for the privilege of parking outside the front door. Kingdom Come is a retread of this millenerian theme, with the spiritually dispossessed hinterlands of the Thames Valley beyond Heathrow finding solace and sense of an English identity in the twin passions of organised hooliganism and consumerism.

It could well be that having your IVA and it or going boldly bankrupt it is the only practical way for the English middle classes to raise two fingers to a society whose outlines grow less familiar and with which it seems less wise or rewarding to seek engagement. Whilst this is clearly not a case of turning the poisons of society into medicine, this loosening of the hitherto tightly bonded helixes of personal responsibility, propriety and ownership that had twisted the English propertied classes into shape and structure could be far reaching.

In chapter two of Joyce's 'Ulysses', the Ulster born headmaster Mr Deasy asks Stephen Dedalus what the proudest boast of an Englishman might be. The Empire, asserts Stephen which Deasy corrects as being able to state 'I paid for this myself' is. Over a century on from that snapshot of Dublin on June 16 1904, the proudest boast of an Englishman is 'I went broke and bust on my own terms'