Pamper the rich, squeeze the poor

Tony Blair’s innovation in British politics was to persuade the working class “Labour” party that the key to winning general elections was to convince the mysterious “Middle England” to vote for you.

What is Middle England in the middle of? It is in the middle of England, but it is also middle class, in the middle of Labour and the Conservatives.

Everyone knows that if you are going to cut spending and raise tax there are two groups of people who you can hurt: one is the rich, because the Conservatives know that they have to hurt them to prove that they aren’t just the party for the super rich. George Osborne also knows that it dosn’t matter how much he puts up capital gains tax, the very rich will still vote Tory.

The poor on the other hand, everyone knows they will either not vote or vote Labour, which leads to Labour taking their support for granted and the Conservatives ignoring their interests. The result: as the Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown, the axe will fall on the less wealthy; there is going to be a mass exodus of poor people from subsidised housing in London and much more.

All this while the middle class will still be able to extract good from the bits of public sector it cares about, most will still be able to get child benefit, the NHS which they use more than any other part of the population will be left totally intact.
The schools they wangle their children into by becoming Born Again Christians or by moving house will remain more or less untouched.

What we need is a character which is half John Rawls, half Robin Hood. He use his reason to persuade and if necessary, his arrows for targeted assassination to make our political elite care less about their electoral fortunes than the welfare of the very poorest in society.
He should make sure that a crisis that began with the state building a deficit by bailing out incompetent, greedy bankers should end with taking from the very poorest in our society to plug it. But he isn’t there so we will have to do it.