I was not going to revisit my observations on how the other half live, but then I read an article by Decca Aitkehead about George Osborne yesterday. Its a good read, but made me realise just how much I don’t know about how the other half live. How can I possibly understand the concerns of someone who has never had a proper job but has ended up with a house in Notting Hill and a farmhouse in Cheshire?

What caught my attention was where Osborne was trying to show his man-of-the-people credentials, and failing miserably:

Osborne thinks his fee-paying, selective boys’ school, St Paul’s, was “incredibly liberal. It didn’t matter who your parents were. Your mother could be the head of a giant corporation – or a solicitor in Kew” as if this encompassed the full imaginable spectrum of socioeconomic status.

If he looks down on ‘a solicitor in Kew’ as an example of the bottom of the pile, what on earth must he think of a teacher in Crawley, a shop assistant in Basildon, a bus driver in Doncaster or any of the other 90% (or more?) of the country who can only dream of the standard of living a solicitor in Kew probably enjoys? But he continues…

At the party conference last year, someone pointed out that he had no working experience of the real world outside Westminster. “Well, it depends what you mean by the real world,” he retorted – and, to demonstrate his intimacy with it, offered: “I have plenty of friends who work in law, in the City, in government agencies.”

The same applies here I think. Its hardly a representative sample of the UK population is it? Very representative of the population of Parliament, but not of the general population. Reading it you can imagine that this is someone who believes that there is a ruling class which I and, I guess, all my readers do not belong to.

As it happens I do not want to be ruled by anyone. Governed by my peers, yes, but not ruled. Thank you to Decca Aitkenhead for reminding me why I ever got involved in the Labour party in the first place.

The scary thing is that Osborne is not even one of the Eton set in the shadow cabinet – plenty of them have far less contact with the real world.