More from Middle England
Chris Dillow has been cataloguing examples of the "Middle England" error . Often committed by journalists, this consists of mistaking a rich person's unusually high income for normality. Chris Blackhurst, the City Editor of the Evening Standard has another egregious example today, in a bitter complaint about the rise in stamp duty: Alistair Darling...is taking from the rich...and I'm the rich. [ LC: this is meant to be sarcastic ] There are a lot of people like me...185,000 homes in England and Wales with seven-figure price tags. That is not "a lot". There are 25 million homes in the UK, of which about 18 million are owner-occupied. Therefore just one per cent of homeowners are affected by this policy. Is it unreasonable to describe the top one per cent of homeowners as rich? Here's Blackhurst's justification for why he isn't rich: The reality today is that £1 million does not buy you a palace, not in the South-East. But it's still a mil...