Friday 26 November 2010

Miliband is no different than Howard Flight .

New Conservative peer Howard Flight has provoked outrage after suggesting welfare cuts will cause unwanted "breeding" among benefit claimants.  This has been condemned outright ,but Labour Politicians are more subtle

Ed Miliband has said  Labour did not do "enough" when it was in power to reform the welfare system, party leader Ed Miliband has said.
There was still a "minority" of able-bodied adults not in work, which "hacks people off".
Again the inference is that people are having a good living off benefits whilst the hard working middle classes pay for it. 

Milliband has vowed to stand up for the "squeezed middle" - people on low and middle incomes who were feeling the pinch of government cuts and a fragile economy.

To my mind Miliband may be not as offensive  as Flight but  even when he says it a minority cheating on benefits ends up taring  all with the same brush. 
Where does he and his fellow Labour MPs condemn the minority of middle classs people cheating on their taxes.?  
The interesting thing is that no politician seems to refer to the Working classes any more, and the reason for this is there is no point in courting the working classes anymore.

Because they have very little political influence.

The fact is because of our political system only a few seats “The Marginal Ones” are of any importance in a general Election and these are nearly all those with Milliband’s “squeezed Middle class” Labour may have huge majorities in the Welsh Valleys but this is of no use when it comes to an election because it is the marginal middle class seats in the South East of England..

Some may point out the big swings to the Liberal Democrats  in Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney and Pontypridd which were quite impressive. But Labour still has no fear of the Tories and of course it is largely the Middleclasses who vote in these constituencies as the working class become more and more apathetic.
The turnout for  Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney  was 58.6% and Pontypridd 63.0% compared with 67.6% and 72.7% in 1983 and I would argue that it it is the poorer member of the electorate who are not voting , or worse not even bothering to enroll as no one speaks for them anymore and we enter vicious a circle where because they don't vote politicians realise they can  ignore them even more than the do now.

This leads to the idea amongst al parties is that because working class people don’t vote they don’t count and therefore means that politicians have no need to court them. Indeed as both Howard Flight and Ed Milliband have shown there is a kudos in attacking them whilst praising the middle classes.

Expect more courting of the Middle classes and more attacks on the working class.


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