Nick Cohen

Conservative readers still don’t understand why the Coalition is hated in the poor areas of Britain. They would grasp the loathing better if they went back through the arguments they made in opposition, and realised that their leaders have failed to follow through the logic of the ideas they once espoused. The best Tory criticism of Gordon Brown to my mind was that he had stood by while the boom bypassed large parts of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the North and South West. He left them with Soviet-style local economies, dominated by the public sector. Their populations’ prosperity depended on state subsidy rather than private endeavour.

On the Today programme this morning an incredulous John Humprhys could not believe Ed Miliband’s suggestion that the “squeezed middle” consisted of people earning a bit above or a bit below £26,000. The Institute of Fiscal Studies might have told Humprhys that this was indeed the band in the middle of British society, and that only the richest 15 per cent or so of people pay the 40 percent tax rate. When I last spoke to the IFS, it told me that it makes as much sense to look household income as individual salaries. By this measure, families bringing in £30-£50,000 a year make up the broad middle class, which fills so much of Britain. Exactly the people Miliband was talking about, in other words. The financial crisis is hammering them.

The Lib Dem press office is one of the sorriest sights in Westminster. A handful of untrained party officers are dealing with a wave of hostility nothing in their right-thinking, left-leaning lives has prepared them for. They thought that they were good. For as long as they can remember everyone they have met has assured them that they were good. Tories were mean and greedy, New Labour was authoritarian and war-mongering. They, by contrast, had always been the nice people in the nice party – maybe a little silly, maybe a little naïve, but fundamentally decent. Now they are hated.