Ed Miliband vs the working class

Who’s on the side of the strivers? Is it George Osborne, who’s cutting benefits in real terms for the next three years, which he defends as ‘being fair to the person who leaves home every morning to go out to work and sees their neighbour still asleep, living a life on benefits’? Or is it Ed Balls, who’s opposing the move as Osborne ‘making striving working families pay the price for his economic failure’? Both men are convinced that their stance will help win the votes of low- and middle-income workers. At least one of them is wrong.

Isabel has explained the sources of Labour’s confidence. One is a YouGov poll released on Sunday, showing 42 per cent of ‘C2DEs’ (working class and lower) think benefits should rise at least in line with inflation. But then, 28 per cent of them think they should only rise by 1 per cent a year, and a further 15 per cent think they should be frozen altogether — a total of 43 per cent in favour of real-terms cuts.