The Tories' middle-class problem?

Rhoda Klapp

Cameron IS losing touch? A grammatical error with the tense, perhaps. That, and a failure to understand or define what the middle class actually is? If it is a worthwhile classification at all.

TomTom

Middle Class ? they're the ones you fawn over in Opposition and screw to the wall in Government. The German word is "Milchkuh" - the Russian is "kulak". It is where all governments look to raid to fund their clientele in the hope that "the more you spend the more they work"

PayDirt

Forget Class, this is about appealing to voters with common sense. Thatcher did not rely on the "middle class" (rather it was something to do with Essexman as I recall). Supply policies that make sense and the next election is there for the winning. Tribal stuff should be a minor part of the game.

Victor Southern

Did the middle only now get squeezed? Waht about the remorseless increases in taxes of all kinds by Brown and Darling?

For Miliband to try to lump together amongst his concerns the poor, the middle and the trade unions is a juggling act beyond human comprehension.

Ask me should the Tory leadership pay more attention to their grassroots and I say Yes. That is now and always and applies to any party.

Ask me should he heed the siren song [or trumpeted blare] of Farage and I say No.

Commentator

I think you will find that Anderson's article was highly critical of the support given by Cameron and Clegg to reverse-racist policies which target the children of the white middle classes for discrimination when they apply to university and apply for jobs. This is classic socialist levelling-down of scapegoats so as to camouflage their unwillingness and inability to root out endemic failure in state education. But we are dealing with here a government being led by the nose by the left.....so not a surprise.

Maggie

Cameron is proving to be a bit disappointing but the middle classes have got more sense than to rally to Miliband's clarion call. Cameron seems to have a worrying lack of confidence in his abilities. The stand out worst moment was during the Election Debates when he obeyed some idiot who gave him disastrous advice on how to speak and how to stand. Cancelling his hols in Thailand was stupid. So was his recent cut price Spanish break. He should have stood firm and not performed ANY u-turns. The BBC and The Guardian do not represent the views of anyone who is likely to vote Tory so he should completely ignore their non-stop hysterics. He'll never please them so why waste time trying. I don't know if its Hilton, Clegg or Maude who keep interfering but next time they tell him he can't do something because the press(or the LibDems) won't like it I wish he'd tell them to Sod Off.

lescam

Not so much middle class, as middle income groups. Class is so last century, it's all about income now. The Tories should forget about classes of any kind.

Personally speaking I am a person of lower middle class origins with a fairly high income. Should I be described as jumped up lower middle class, nouveau riche working class, or what? I also think that class is defined by education, and a person with absolutely no cash or background of any kind, but with a decent education and an enquiring mind, is automatically middle class regardless of what their parents did.

NickB

It's easy to say these things when Brown literally moved a huge lazy chunk of people into the public sector with massive privileges in the name of "fareness" that now are a deceitful army against the rational people in the country who are prepared to work and use their freedoms to support themselves.

Vulture

You can tell that Dave's in trouble when a serial loyalist like the Brute sounds the alarm.

Bruce's governing mantra, since Thatcher, has been slavish loyalty to whoever leads the Tories at any given time. Major, Hague, IDS, Howard, Dave - the Brute backed them all.

Of course Dave has lost touch with the Middle Class - he has never been 'in touch' with them. His Govt is going disastrously wrong in every direction and does not know what to do. Roll on May 5th.

TGF UKIP

What's even more "striking" is that Anderson was one of the prime movers in the London media conspiracy in 2005 to con the poor old Stupid Party into electing Dave.

The best take on Dave's hostility to the strivers was Ross Clark's piece for the fanzine some while back entitled something like, as I recall, "Cameron sells out the middle classes." Quite predictably, of course, you'll search for it in vain in the archives - plainly far too off message for The Cameron Speccie.

oldtimer

Before the election I more or less gave Cameron the benefit of the doubt. More in the sense that I voted for the Conservative candidate in my constituency; less in the sense that I thought it necessary to write to the said candidate that I was voting for him on the basis of his personal qualities - not because he was a Conservative. I have now reached the point where I write to him to say I will no longer vote for him because he represents the Cameron version of the Conservative party.

The reason for this is that there are fundamental issues about which I do not agree. Among them are the over compliant policies on the EU, the Carbon Plan (the UK national suicide note) with its failure to secure competitive energy supplies in the future and its arrogant notion that politicians can control the climate, and his recent expression of attitudes on subjects like Kashmir and entry to our leading universities which I find surprising in a British PM. It is obvious that he is forced into disagreeable (to me) compromises with the LibDems. But I am beginning to wonder if, in fact, he quite likes them.

John HW

All this talk of 'middle-class' this, that and the other just makes me want to scream. It's just so typical of the arrant nonsense that has disfigured the British psyche for centuries: the risible notion that one set of people or the other - 'upper class, middle-class' are inherently superior to the rest. What complete rubbish. On the other issue, I think George Osborne might find that the next General Election will occur well before he has anything to give away.

Michael

Cameron, before the election, and I paraphrase since I do not have a photographic memory:
" You may hear me saying some unusual things, but do not worry, I'm one of you." I was silly enough to give him the benefit of the doubt. But revealed now, he is indeed a socialist and not a Conservative at all.
I'm sorry for being a useful idiot.
If only a UKIP vote counted...

Tiresias

Can someone please explain succinctly what David Cameron is in politics to achieve? And can someone then go on to explain what elements of the population his Conservative Party seek to represent? And what it has done in office to protect and advance their interests?

I am afraid I am at a loss to supply much of an answer to these questions to myself. Until I see convincing answers I find it hard to think that this government will do anything other than wither rapidly through the ineffectual into confusion before falling into a period of chaotic and terminal failure.

Owen Morgan

So Camerrhoid has given up on the "white middle classes" (and, I presume, the Indian middle classes, the West Indian middle classes, the West African middle classes, the Chinese middle classes and anybody whom I may have forgotten - Cameron definitely has). The middle classes, of whatever race, do the work around here, make the money, pay the taxes. If you crush the middle class, Cameron, you end up in Smolensk.

yank

Cameron is a leftist, much like the Spectator that fawns over him.

Which is too bad, because a conservative could govern the UK, even with a minority government. Canada is doing it. They've had 4 elections in 7 years, but the conservatives are toughing it out and not compromising.

Meanwhile, Call Me Dave LOVES coalitions with communists, but he'd sooner caucus with a leper than a conservative.

normanc

The greatest advantage that the Tories have is that they aren't Labour. No one with an iota of sense from the so-called squeezed middle could think things would be better under the two 'ed cases than they are now.

On the other hand, the Conservatives are in a coalition with the Lib Dems and they are ideological bedfellows with Labour, so for every 1% Lib Dem vote that defects to Labour it's a 2% swing away from the coalition.

So it's not so much that he has to convice Tories he knows what he's doing but leftie Lib Dems to return to the fold.

With the boundary changes a long way from finished, so taking away the chance of Cameron calling a snap election in the autumn, I think, if anything, we'll see the coalition lurching further to the left.

Verity

Tiresias - Good post. Especially your first para.

Richard

Tiresias: 'Can someone please explain succinctly what David Cameron is in politics to achieve? '

As little disturbance as possible to the lives of the bankers and the rest of the super-rich?

Keith

Cameron may be (is) a huge disappointment but that will not drive Tory voters into the arms of Labour. It might send them towards UKIP though. I never thought I would vote for UKIP but I've run out of patience with DC.

Dennis Churchill

“...Tory party is ignoring the hopes, fears and aspirations of the white middle classes.”
And we have heard the Labour party has lost the support of the white working class—could it be that our political class is now so detached from the values of the majority of Britons (or Brits as the media refer to us) that they resemble a colonial administration?
Crime,immigration,the European Union, military intervention, squatters, levels of welfare dependency, the education system, bail-outs for Euroland,Man Made Global warming, the Human Rights’ Act...

Tiberius

"And then there's the fact that the coalition is currently operating in the wake of a recession. Come the election, Osborne will have more fiscal space in which to operate, and can think about some middle-class friendly giveaways".

Perhaps Bruce is having a wobble, but the above quotation is the most important elememt of the piece.

The middle class is squeezed because of 13 years od Prime Mentalism.

DJT

"Its argument is that the Tory party is ignoring the hopes, fears and aspirations of the white middle classes."

Why just the white ones...is there something inherently different about black, Asian or Chinese aspiration?

TrevorsDen

PayDirt - what were Thatchers ratings before the Falklands?

Cameron is left wing (a socialist I, hilariously, hear someone say)? He is pushing cuts deeper than Thatcher.

Reforming schools, reforming the NHS, reforming benefits and most importantly filling potholes. The speed limit might be going up to 80 even.

Tiresias - 'One Nation'. IDS seems to me a one nation conservative. Perversely Blair and Brown by their policies have split the nation. Millions of Brits parked on benefits because the labour party gave up on them - or rather uses them as slave-voters.

DJT - hard working Indians are tailor made conservatives. Poles ditto. Pity we cannot do a swap with them and our own deadbeats (see? I am right wing). But not a racist.

TrevorsDen

lescam - you say we should forget about class - then go on to obsess about it.

Perhaps you might considerer that that is what is wrong about Britain?

TrevorsDen

The 'middle income earners' are the ones in the numbers and the money who are available to pay our debts. Debts run up by Labour. It was ever thus. Nothing new.

To pretend there is some other source of magical money is to live in the same fantasy world as oh so many of the ...

Oh dammit - I was trying so hard not to be rude.

Olaf

"Middle class" seems to now mean anyone with a job, anyone with a mortgage, anyone who obeys the laws of the land. Also known as the prime target for taxation, easy meat for the police and roadblocks to diversity by local authorities.

TomTom

"He is pushing cuts deeper than Thatcher."

Funnily enough she was not as aggressive as Healey in cutting public spending. With North Sea Oil coming ashore Thatcher simply butchered the private sector which is exactly what Michael Edwardes warned about as manufacturing was wiped out by "the Dutch Disease"

Percy

@lescam

Quite right I thought it was all socio-economic groupings now.

El Sid

This isn't really news, and it's not really about class. It reflects a much more serious split between the two wings of the Tories, between the metropolitan elite and the provincial middle Englanders. Both need each other, but like to think that they don't.

At the moment that balance has been lost - it's all Notting Hillbillies and not enough Grantham grocers. It feels like Pickles is the only representative of the provincial bourgeousie with a major role in this government - and its perhaps no coincidence that he is standing out right now. In current circumstances, we need less Earl Grey and a bit more Yorkshire tea....