Labour have targeted their latest battle cry at “the squeezed middle”, the vaguely defined concept of anybody and everybody who thinks someone above them is having it easy, and someone below is taking them for a ride. Attempts to pin this group down to a specific class or income bracket have rightly met with ridicule, but this is not because the squeezed middle is a bad strategy to employ. The best political strategies are ones that let voters choose how to define them, and make them relevant to their own lives. Obama succeeded because everyone had a change in mind, and everyone had something to hope for. Onto his campaign they could project these hopes, seeing in the candidate exactly what they wanted to. But if at any point Obama had to pin his change down, to say exactly who it was for, he would’ve collapsed – you can’t fit the majority of the electorate into any sensible definition.
What you can do is make it a mantra. Every policy creates a middle, and every middle feels squeezed. Tuition fee reform lets off low earners, gives a free ride to anyone with rich parents, but leave anyone earning above £30,000 noticeably worse off in the long run. Tax policy lets ‘scroungers’ off the hook, and leaves enough loopholes for the rich to domicile themselves in Belize (although this particularly loophole is now closing). Every policy is designed to protect the vulnerable, lest we become a heartless society, and to encourage personal economic success, lest we become even less competitive as a country. Given we need to fund the state somehow, the middle will always bear a high burden.
Labour know this. Their passionate support of often ludicrous universal benefits is a commitment to this middle. But having lost the brains that ran the Party for the last fifteen years or so, they’ve forgotten how to catch the middle’s eye.
The key is that the middle is not homogenous. Chris Bryant tried defining it in terms of an income of between £16,000 and £50,000 a year – hardly a united socio-economic group. If every policy creates its own middle, then every policy response needs to target that particular middle. Each generates its own injustices, and Labour can pick on them. These middles will often overlap, and could find Labour a core area of support, but this need not be at the expense of any others – individual voters affected by welfare, education or health reforms can at least become sympathisers.
Whenever a government is under fiscal pressure, someone has to suffer. The Coalition cannot cut off the vulnerable, but nor can they get a grip on those wealthy enough to squeeze through every loophole. During the Labour years, Brown and Blair managed to keep extending benefits to the middle, drawing them into the New Labour project. Now this is no longer possible, the Coalition risk the wrath of the working mother, the pushy parent, and the petitioning pensioner. They cannot afford to buy these groups off. If Labour want to seize their best chance in 2015, it has to be to harness this resentment.
