Never mind the rich and poor, what about the middle classes?

By Benedict Brogan Politics

Politicians pay a disproportionate amount of attention to the rich and the poor, but not enough to the middle classes.

In America, it is the most courted group in politics. Politicians accord it near-mythical status. In his State of the Union address last week, Barack Obama announced it was “our generation’s task” to “reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth – a rising, thriving middle class”. He named an act of Congress after them – or, more precisely, after the specific issue of “middle-class tax relief”. Being middle class is not just an aspiration on the other side of the Atlantic, it’s a birthright. To be American, at least if the politicians are to be listened to, is to be middle class. True, the facts of where the tax burden falls in the United States never quite live up to the rhetoric, but there has always been attention paid to the mass of people in the middle and their central place in the national success story.

Mr Obama used the phrase repeatedly in his re-election campaign and pushed his idea that “America does best when the middle class is doing well”. It was hardly an original approach: his presidential predecessors going back at least to Richard Nixon found ways to label a broad coalition of voters in the economic centre whose aspirations and fears deserved the attention of the politicians. Mitt Romney tried something similar, then struggled when he suggested that earning more than £200,000 qualified as middle class. What Americans have long understood, though, is that regardless of what the precise definition might be – they seem to agree on an income of between £25,000 and £80,000 – the common characteristic worth praising is hard work wedded to unquenchable aspiration.

Here, it’s strikingly different. The middle classes have been erased from the political debate. They receive scant explicit attention from our elected leaders. The Tories take them for granted. Labour still resents the way Tony Blair enlisted them to give him his successive election victories. The three main parties treat them as a golden goose that clucks occasionally but seldom complains, while deploring their sharp elbows. A whole caste of people including senior policemen, Army officers, farmers, lawyers, City workers, head teachers, civil servants, doctors and company managers find themselves heavily taxed – it is one of the most damning indictments of the Coalition that the number of higher rate taxpayers will go from about three million when it took office to nearly 5.5 million in 2016 – but neglected. No one speaks for them.

If they figure at all, it is as a group to be derided, reduced to a caricature framed by Boden, Waitrose tempered by Lidl, holidays in France, and a fondness for television box sets. Their dinner-party concerns about finding a good school, a decent house or a good hospital qualify for jokes, little else. The tributes paid to Richard Briers remind us that, at best, the middle classes are an object of gentle ribbing, but seldom to be admired as the shock troops of economic recovery. Instead, politics has been reduced to an argument over how best to clobber the wealthy in order to help the poor, two small groups who attract a disproportionate amount of attention from politicians.

Next week, helpfully, the people of Eastleigh will give us an update on the state of British politics. It may be no more than a snapshot that tells us little about the prospects for the general election in 2015, but the result of the by-election will give us an idea at least of how David Cameron is doing, whether Nick Clegg is slowing his party’s slide to disaster, and what the south of England makes of Ed Miliband. Above all, Eastleigh will give us a sense of middle class opinion. As a seat in the Southampton commuter belt it reflects all that is aspirational about England: broadly prosperous but not wealthy, marked by families striving to make the best for themselves. Maria Hutchings, the Tory candidate mocked by her opponents for her plain speaking, embodies an admirable hunger shared by millions to improve the chances of her children by affording some of them a private education. She was pounced on for appearing to suggest that her children would be disadvantaged at the local state school. Her treatment reminds us that it can be dangerous to aspire in modern Britain. No wonder so many middle-class parents are tempted to stay silent rather than admit that they would prefer to send their children to fee-paying schools.

The Labour leader has come the closest to trying to define a block of voters in the centre, using a bit of semantic jiggery-pokery to label his target group as the struggling or squeezed middle. It’s been smart politics because the term has been widely adopted, and has allowed him to pray in aid for all those who are finding their standard of living crushed between higher inflation and falling wages. He has appointed himself as the voice of those who have borne the brunt of fuel rises, child benefit cuts, tax increases, parking charges, and the myriad other ways that the middle classes are having to pay more (overlooking, of course, that much of it is the price to all of us of Labour’s economic failures).

Mr Miliband’s latest offering is a plan to reintroduce the 10p tax rate and to pay for it by levying a “mansion tax” on houses worth £2 million or more. Never mind that the 10p band was introduced and then scrapped by Gordon Brown, or that it helps only a small number at the bottom end of the tax distribution. And ignore that the mansion tax will raise very little and require a politically suicidal revaluation of council tax before it can be introduced. Mr Miliband’s initiative encapsulates how the modern political debate has moved from Tony Blair’s restless search for the support of middle Britain to a fight over who is prepared to take the most from the wealthiest in order to give more to the poorest.

In the past the Tories have shown a worrying willingness to be drawn into this politics of extremes that characterises the Labour and Lib Dem preoccupations with the rich and poor. They bashed the bankers and embraced Nick Clegg’s campaign to take 2.2 million people out of tax altogether – at an eye-watering cost of £9 billion – by raising the starting threshold. Yet in their conference speeches and in the autumn statement last year, Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne showed they also understand both the economic challenges we face and the central role the aspirations of the British people will play in dragging us out of the mess. The danger is not that the Chancellor will be fooled into trying to match Labour’s tax tinkering in his budget, but that Downing Street will not do enough to explain what it has already done to help those in the middle with tax cuts that will be felt in April.

Their next step must be to talk explicitly about the middle classes, and the fundamental importance of helping them not just to keep more of the money they have, but to earn more. Let’s hear Mr Cameron promise a middle-class tax cut. Let’s hear Mr Osborne acknowledge that the economy will be rescued by those in the middle, who pay the standard rate and are increasingly dragged into the higher rate, who run companies and small businesses, who take risks, who may well feel squeezed but who know, too, that they are not at the bottom of the pile and have no intention of ending up there. The middle classes are hungry to succeed and just wish politicians would pay a bit less attention to those at the top and the bottom, and a bit more to them.Telegraph