I grew up near Lockerbie, a small town in Scotland famous internationally for the terror attack of 1988, the year I was born. I had an opportunity to go to university, thanks in large part to the absence of tuition fees (although I still left with around £25,000 of debt in the form of a student loan). This, in turn, gave me the opportunity to move to a large city, live abroad, and form friendship groups that were and remain highly international.

Today I live in London, and form part of the younger, precarious, multiethnic working class that is found in the UK’s large urban centers. Alongside the areas of long-standing deprivation in the big cities, many of us are university-educated, highly indebted, and destined to spend the rest of our lives renting expensive property from a series of landlords. We are culturally misread and misrepresented by most of the media as a metropolitan “middle class” — but this misreading is, in one sense, understandable. After all, for most people who go to university, economic security and fulfilling employment is the aspiration. Being comfortably middle class is what we were told would be possible. A large part of the process of our radicalization has been the realization that it is not.

Living in London, I see enormous wealth, even if I have no access to it. The glass and concrete monuments to finance capital show me exactly where the magic money tree is. The house that my partner and I rent, at £1,300 a month, is “worth” well over half a million. After living here for the best part of a decade, I am still stunned by the vast opulence on show in parts of the city center, and find even the alien comfort of leafy suburbs oppressive in the distance it stands from my own life. Alongside this, I see enormous and devastating poverty, and I know which end of the scale I’m closer to and where I would end up if I was out of work for any significant period of time.