Only the Tories can meet the aspirations of Ikea’s hard-working families

If Ikea were a constituency, it would be a three-way marginal. That was my thought one morning last week as I walked a mile and a half round the Batley branch of the great Swedish retailer behind two keen shoppers (one wearing a pedometer) whom I had driven there as a birthday treat. Here are middle-aged parents buying nursery stuff for pregnant daughters, engaged couples fitting out first flats, Polish families bickering over bargain kitchenware, Muslim housewives chattering behind niqab facemasks, and even what I thought might be a transsexual under a blond beehive.

There’s a Scandinavian sense of equality: no fast track through the labyrinth, no exclusive luxury floor. The customers all seem to belong to that floating-voter category now labelled ‘hard-working families’. They all want to own and improve their homes and make a better life for their children — and all must have a steady breadwinner or they wouldn’t be filling their trolleys.

All are evidence of the continuing turnaround of the economy, in which average earnings are at last rising at 2 per cent above (zero) inflation, and growth in household disposable income has returned to pre-crash levels. But if the store is not crowded as it might be on high days and holidays, that’s because some consumers are still paying down debt rather than racking it up anew, which surely can’t be a bad thing.

The rate of growth took a surprising dip to 0.3 per cent in the first quarter, from 0.6 per cent in late 2014. The annual Rich List tells us that the wealthy have doubled their net worth while the rest of us are only fractionally better off than we were before the financial crisis. That’s two news items the Tories could do without after such a lacklustre campaign.