The new leader of the U.K. Labour Party, Ed Miliband, has promised to campaign in the interests of the ‘squeezed middle’. I read a
blog post by BBC analyst Nick Robinson on this statement that I found interesting, and raises many of the same questions that Miliband’s comment raised with me:
We know Ed Miliband's standing up for them but who exactly are they?
The Labour leader's phrase "the squeezed middle" is deliberately vague. It has the same widespread appeal as "hard-working families who do the right thing" - the phrase William Hague once used.
Pretty much everyone - bar, perhaps, the very poor and the very rich are meant to think Ed's talking about them. What's more, the phrase has the advantage that newspapers tend to replace it with the more reader-friendly words "middle classes". This morning's Telegraph, for example, implies he'll stand up for their readers even though he said no such thing. What's wrong with that, you may ask? After all, he's a political leader trying to re-build a widespread coalition of support.
The problem is that, as someone once said, to govern is to choose and when there's no money to spend you do really need to choose.
So, it matters whether Ed Miliband's standing up for people on £50,000 a year who stand to lose their child benefit or those on £40,000 who stand to lose their tax credits - both, incidentally, statistically part of the rich "few" rather than the poor "many" - or those he met in Tescos in Dudley yesterday who earn £6.81 an hour and had the same views about those on benefits as Howard Flight (even though they didn't use the word "breeding"). If he intends to stand up for them all at the same time that may tell people something about his willingness to make choices.
When I interviewed Ed yesterday, he refused to define his terms beyond saying it didn't mean millionaires and that everyone knew what it meant anyway. This morning on the Today programme he was pushed again by John Humphrys. He explained that he meant those above and below the median salary and, in particular, those earning less than £45,000 and, therefore, on the basic rate of income tax. He went on to say that the words "squeezed middle" and "middle classes" meant something different.
This is the group who John Healey, the man who topped the shadow cabinet elections, identified as "one third of the population who manage with a household income either side of the UK's £22,000 median... more than 7 million families with an annual income between £14,500 and £33,800; 14 million people working hard for low and modest wages." Healey wrote that:
"The squeezed middle seem stuck in no man's land. Too poor to get the best from the market, too well off to claim state benefits. Not wealthy enough to get a mortgage, not sufficiently vulnerable for social housing.
We too easily allow a mobile, metropolitan class to skew our understanding of society. Too many of those in the media, political and public policy world take people earning 40 or 50 thousand pounds or more as typical of 'the middle'. The real squeezed middle are overlooked by the press, and overlooked by the modern Right."
This is the group Ed Miliband's really talking about but, spotting the danger of saying so this morning, he quickly reverted to saying that he meant everyone who wasn't rich and wasn't poor and were, after all, middle class.
Many wiser than me who've slogged through long years of opposition - whether on the Tory or the Labour benches - will tell you that Ed's wise not to pin himself down to policy positions early, that opposition's a marathon and not a sprint, that being seen to listen and learn is the most important priority after an election defeat.
However, definition matters too. At the moment Ed Miliband's struggling to find it.
I’m keeping an eye out for some American articles on this subject as well, but some of the basic points are the same.
As a key point, I think that many people simply don’t realise what a median or average income is. After all, we tend to associate most strongly with those from similar backgrounds to us, who live in similar neighbourhoods and make similar amounts of money. I’ve referred to
this graph before, but I think it is very striking. The median annual income of an American over 25 years of age is
a little over $32,000, while the median income of all Americans who worked for wages in 2005 was $28,567[/url]. And even that is close to twice the likely income of someone on a full-time minimum-wage job. I would be willing to bet that many middle-class people would expect those figures to be significantly higher, and people on 40k and 50k would be surprised to see that they are, in fact, privileged – people of well above-average wealth in one of the wealthiest countries in the world.
Miliband can be deliberately vague for this very reason. People on £30k, £40k and £50k are all probably going to be thinking of themselves as ‘the squeezed middle’. They’d certainly be middle-class, even though Miliband acknowledged (rightly) that middle-income earners are different from the middle classes. I imagine that Labour is more secure with voters in the sub-£30k range, although plenty of them would think of themselves as being the squeezed middle as well.
One of the reasons, I think, why Americans in particular tend to be fuzzy on these issues is that social class and income is more strongly tied to geography. Most of America’s poor live in the rural south and Appalachia, where they would be unlikely to come into contact with middle-class suburbanites from the coastal cities. As such, those people could go on thinking of themselves as being struggling average-income earners. Another interesting wikipedia article is
this one on America’s poorest counties. Seventy counties have a median household income less than 22k, and all are found in the same twenty-four states (which do not include any states on the west coast, New England or the Great Lakes). Hell, the median household income (that’s household income, mind) in Starr County, Texas, is
seven thousand dollars per year.
This is my issue with this whole debate. I don’t like to sound like I’m lecturing, but the people on this board seem to view social class, if they view it at all, is being a case of them (squeezed and under-represented) against the super-rich. But to many of your fellow citizens, you are the rich.
. 
because I don't want anybody taking generic you as personal you. I'm speaking generically, not addressing any specific person.