France’s former President Nicolas Sarkozy called them ‘Alarm Clock France’. The UK Labour Party leader Ed Miliband has called them the ‘squeezed middle’. Economists call them adults in low-to-middle-income households (LMIs). We name this group after their frustrations. Often families with annual household incomes of between £15k and £23k, the Just Nots are almost, but just not, making ends meet.
‘They work hard, they are decent to other people, they are trying to be aspirational,’ says trends analyst Sean Pillot de Chenecey, who has researched this group, ‘but they are just not getting the benefits.’
Click through the sections on this page to see how The Just Nots trend has been manifest since 2011.