As an independent creature, the Resolution Foundation’s new Commission on Living
Standards isn’t doing Ed Miliband’s work for him. But, boy, must the Labour leader be glad that they exist. At their launch event this morning, the “squeezed middle” – aka
low-to-middle earners – suddenly took shape. There were graphs, such as those in James Plunkett’s post for us earlier, setting out the very real problems facing a segment of British
society. And there were even definitions explaining what that segment is: 11 million adults, by the Resolution Foundation’s count, too rich to benefit from measures for the least well-off, and too
poor to be entirely comfortable.
This was a decent platform for Miliband’s speech, and he used it to make a fairly important leap forward. “We did a lot to help these people in the tax and benefit system,” he said, “but we’ve also got to look at what can be done in the wider economy.”
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