by Robin Thorpe

With Ed Miliband’s recent talk of rebuilding the middle class and his previous rhetoric of the squeezed middle are we now seeing a resurgence of class consciousness? Or is Ed just focusing on familiar words to cloak his lack of credible policies? I sincerely hope it is the former. The problem with the concept of class is that because the labour market is now so diverse it can be difficult for people to identify what class they are. Perhaps, therefore, we should just recognise that there are broadly only two classes of people; the ‘power elite’ and the rest of us.

I can understand why people may want to cling to the notion that there is a hierarchy of socio-economic divisions that we can climb up if we only work hard enough. People have evolved to compete for resources and societies have long been predicated on prestige and social position. But surely we must now recognise that the division between the elite and the rest is so entrenched that it will take more than a bit of pluck and a protestant work ethic to break the stranglehold of inequality. Will Hutton has written that he thinks that Ed Miliband’s “cost of living” crisis is a sideways route into opening up an argument over inequality and I hope that he is right.

Enabling effective change will not be easy; there are many vested interested who will oppose a recalibration of the way that our economy works. The obvious attack on Miliband’s ambition is to decry it as statist and anti-business. Fraser Nelson writes in the Telegraph that a Labour government implementing this agenda would result in “companies refusing to invest, and wealth-creators leaving”. This argument ignores the fact that the notion of state vs. business is a false choice; neither can this choice be defined as socialism vs. capitalism. Instead it should be defined as shallow versus deep freedom.

Steve Davies from the Institute for Economic Affairs (on Radio 4’s The Longview) agrees that the cost of living is a real problem for those on low wages; in particular the cost of housing. But he also states that workers must increase their productivity to improve their wage-earning capacity, as if low wages are their fault for not working hard enough. Solving the problem of the cost of living will still leave people dependant on increasingly precarious employment.

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