DAVID Cameron’s conference speech this week was supposed to be a defence of conservative values. But by defining the Tories as “the party of the want to be better-off,” he revealed the limit of his ambitions. Continue reading
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Tag Archives: Middle class
There’s no middle way: Stretch or be squeezed
THE Oxford English Dictionary has declared Ed Miliband’s phrase “the squeezed middle” its word of the year. Yes, it’s a phrase, not a word, and let’s set aside how tricky writing the definition must have been, given that Miliband’s concept of the middle appears to reach over the whole population except for far extremes of poverty and wealth. The strength this slightly flabby concept exercises in the popular mind seems to show it is getting at a real anxiety, however vaguely. But its passive phrasing misses the point. The real question for the worried middle of British society is not how bruised it feels by the nation’s current economic pinch, but how it confronts that challenge. Continue reading
