I am a media whore in that I read the Guardian and the Telegraph to get two contrasting takes on life and the Telegraph had an interesting article on the ‘coping classes’. These are the people who pay tax, consume minimal state services, support their children’s hobbies and have strong aspirations for themselves and their offspring. I thought it was a much better term than the oft used middle class as that can mean anything.
The thrust of the article was that the battle for Nu Labours deputy leadership is all about appearing who can be the most left wing (if you saw Newsnight you will know what they mean) but it is the coping classes who decide elections and keep the country afloat, yet receive the most hatred from the liberal chattering classes. This is what I have been thinking for a long time but it was nice to see it expressed succinctly and it reminds me of the Stalinist times in the Soviet Union, when anyone with a middle class background was sentenced to a longer prison term than someone with a working class background and people would go to great lengths to pretend they had a workers or peasant backgrounds.
Why the liberal Guardianistas hate the coping classes baffles me, as they pay the tax to allow the army of social workers, community workers, racial equality workers and thought police to exist. All state wealth is the result of tax of some sort and yet we are meant to hate the tax payer and love the tax consumer. If the coping classes consumed state resources in the proportion of the underclass the country would be poorer than Albania.
I am sure that would not disappoint the Guardianistas though, as long as we were equally poor and hungry they would have achieved their dream of equalty i.e. lets bring everyone down and call it tackling disadvantage.
I wish I was young enough to emigrate as there is no future in Blairs PC think tank experiment and remember Brown hates the Middle Class even more and wants more of your wealth to spend badly by the state. PFI anyone, Millennium Dome, Olympics, Tax Credits, NHS Computer Systems etc etc etc. As Greg Dyke said last night on question time, if in any walk of life apart from politics the cock ups made by the government would have led to mass sackings.
