Do you know anyone who earns more than £150,000 a year? No, me neither.
Yet according to Daily Telegraph columnist Simon Heffer such people constitute 'Middle England'.
Heffer claims that
"Labour's policies are shaped increasingly, if not exclusively, by considerations of how it advances the cause of its own people. Those who are not in that category – such as most of you reading this column – get what is coming to them."Again, I wonder what percentage of Daily Telegraph readers earn over £150K. Very, very few I should imagine.
The best response to this claptrap comes from commenter 'mac', who writes:
This article laid bare the hypocrisy of Tory sympathisers. To say that 150K is representative of "middle England" shows how out of touch they are with the REAL middle Britain who earns far less than 150K. I really hope voters see what danger the Tories would actually pose to the real middle England because they would end up cutting everything for us in favour of the RICH who earn 150K or more.
That's not an argument to vote Labour. But it's certainly a good argument not to vote for the party Mr Heffer supports.
6 comments:
Worse still, Neil. Harry Phibbs in the Guardian laments the existence of the minimum wage. This Tory backlash is going to be horrendous, and the closer we get to the inevitable braying and gloating, the angrier I get thinking about Blair and his cronies who have set this up beautifully for his legacy to be continued (and intensified) by podgy Dave Cameron and the Bullingdon Club. Dark, dark times ahead.
Hi Olching, I totally agree.
Alistair Heath made a gallant attempt to deprive Wally of the Week with this piece of OTT nonsense on the Spectator blog:
"It's official: enterprise, hard work, education, success and aspiration are no longer valued in Britain. Yesterday's Budget, by far the most irresponsible in recent history, marked the final death of the New Labour project".
http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/3559041/a-shameless-budget.thtml
If only, if only.....
£150,00K pa is middle England? Sounds like he hangs out with the leadership of the Communist Party of Britain.
I looked at that Guardian article on the minimum wage. " Is low pay better than no pay?" he asks. Low pay IS effectively no pay, if it's not enough to live on, and it necessitates subsidies like working family tax credit or whatever.
It would take a generation to rebuild Labour (and the trade unions). Voting for the Lib Dems to counter the others won't work because they all have the same policies. The extra-parliamentary left, SWP and Respect, are just not serious. The only hope is that Labour voters come to their senses and switch en masse to the Greens, and realistically there's no chance of that in time to avert the coming massacre - the IMF telling us to end welfare, the NHS, close schools etc.
Oh, and there's the BNP - well at least they're a bit to the left of Labour, and it would register a disapproval of the EU, and maybe they'd stick the 'organisations of the working class' up against a wall and shoot them, which could be the best thing that's happened to the working class for a long time.
Neil,
I have a suspicion that that number might derive from Mr. Heffer having read too much right-wing American commentary on American income ranges.
Despite the fact that American dollar-for-dollar incomes have been stagnating since 1973 just as surely as British pound-for-pound ones over the same period, the number he quotes would appear to be not unrepresentative of what some Americans would consider to be a baseline middle-class income. Either that, or his argument has been framed according to the kind of loopy definition of wealth favoured by those libertarians who believe that so-called 'free trade' makes us all wealthier. Admittedly you live nearer the UK's centre of gravity than I do, but I certainly don't know anyone who earns the kind of money he's talking about.
But it's certainly a good argument not to vote for the party Mr Heffer supports.I don't actually know which party Heffer currently supports - it certainly isn't the Tories, given his public disdain for 'Dave' Cameron and the latter's equally strong antipathy in return.
Perhaps you can enlighten us?
"Oh, and there's the BNP - well at least they're a bit to the left of Labour, and it would register a disapproval of the EU, and maybe they'd stick the 'organisations of the working class' up against a wall and shoot them, which could be the best thing that's happened to the working class for a long time."
I ll second that!
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