by Dave Osler

The coalition is on a collision course with Middle England, and just how Mondeo Man, Worcester Woman, the C2s and the Dinkies are going to respond remains to be seen.

I’m taking it as read that the turn to the small state unveiled in the emergency budget will hurt the poor. But the poor are, by definition, suffering anyway.

The long term unemployed will continue to be long term unemployed; pensioners subsisting on the basic state pension will remain pensioners subsisting on the basic state pension. Their deprivation will be ratcheted up a notch or three.

But like the legendary frog gradually boiled to death in a saucepan, they may not particularly notice.



The people that won’t know what has hit them will be those that have done quite well out of Thatcherism and Blairism, a layer for which the media has invented various soubriquets in recent decades.

Marxists consider many of them working class, but that’s not how they see themselves. Indeed, they would be mildly insulted by the chav connotation.

Maybe they are on 35K, either because they exercise a bit of managerial authority, or they put the graft in when there’s some overtime going. They are two-thirds of the way through the mortgage, and they’ve got a decent set of wheels, thank you.

The changes to their circumstances will be brutal and sudden. What if their jobs, in the public and private sectors alike, disappear overnight? For many of them, it will be their first ever experience of signing on.

If they stay in work, they will be told that the pensions to which they thought they were entitled are no longer there. The house that they were planning to sell on hitting 65 may not yield anywhere near the nest egg they were banking on.

Their sense of injustice will be palpable, and the equation between their pain and the bail out of the financial system will be readily made. Anger, frustration and ill feeling will abound. But will that translate into radicalism, or even militancy?

The more optimistic sections of the far left, mindful of what is happening in Greece, are confident that the answer cannot be anything other than yes, and furthermore that the radicalisation will be in a socialist direction. That is not ruled out, but is hardly a given, either.

Middle England is a long way removed from the tradition of struggle that those of us who lived through the 1970s and 1980s will readily recall.

It is in the main not organised in trade unions, and in any case, the leadership of the existing labour movement is more given to rhetoric than acting as a catalyst for civil disobedience.

There may well be social explosions at the bottom of society, as last seen in the early Thatcher period. However, that is not inconsistent with the maintenance of social peace in Tunbridge Wells.

And of course, the left has no monopoly on radicalism. The left should never forget that sections of the right can, and will, be offering that commodity too.