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The Guardian view on Britain’s new class divide: the professional middle is being hollowed out | Editorial
The tectonic plates of Britain's professional landscape are shifting with a violence that would unnerve even the most seasoned market watcher, creating a new and perilous class divide. A micro-elite in the rarefied worlds of quantitative finance and technology is hoover up talent with the aggressive efficiency of a high-frequency trading algorithm, while the traditional white-collar professions that once defined secure, respectable middle-class life are being systematically hollowed out, their lustre fading faster than a bear market.The Financial Times recently illuminated this stark reality, reporting that the City of London has become a global epicentre for 'quant' firms, where mathematical wizards from Oxford are being lured with starting salaries ranging from a staggering £250,000 to an almost unimaginable £800,000. The academic in charge of mathematical finance laid it bare: to accept a mere six-figure sum is to be 'the sad guy,' with the hallowed halls of JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs now considered passé, the investment banking dinosaurs of a bygone era.The siren call is personified by figures like Alex Gerko of XTX Markets, who pocketed £682 million last year, a number so vast it warps the very concept of labour and reward. Yet, the more insidious and harder-to-grasp consequence lies in the inverse relationship this creates for the broader professional class.On the very same front page, a chilling counter-narrative emerged: graduate entrants to City blue-chip firms now earn a median salary of just £33,000, a figure perilously close to the new national minimum wage of £26,400. This compression is a fundamental market failure, a signal that the debt incurred for a university education no longer yields a reliable wage premium.The corporate response, as cold and logical as a quant's model, is not to raise wages but to preserve margins by further automating roles with AI or offshoring them entirely, a strategy that promises to exacerbate the rupture. This isn't merely an economic rebalancing; it's a societal reordering that rewards proximity to capital over tangible contribution, creating a two-tier system where a tiny fraction operates in a hyper-capitalized stratosphere while the professional middle, the traditional backbone of social stability, faces a future of diminished prospects and devalued skills. The long-term consequences are profound, threatening not just economic mobility but social cohesion itself, as the bridge between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else is dismantled, plank by algorithmic plank.
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