Labour’s latest leader did, however, interrupt his time with baby Sam to comment here and there. Most memorably he joined the chorus along with PM Cameron to condemn Thatcher retread Lord Young of Grantham’s remarks that we had ‘never had it so good’ in the ‘so-called recession’. It would be easy to see his lordship as another out-of-touch dinosaur at home with chums constituting a cabinet of millionaires. Cameron’s withering putdown of a man old enough to be his father – ‘I think he’ll be doing a lot less speaking’ was both characteristically patronising and calculated to demonstrate that the ex-Bullingdon boy feels our pain. However, was Thatcher’s one-time business tsar who came out of retirement unpaid with a brief to think the unthinkable, then was ignominiously given the boot for doing so, actually right? I think so. Let me explain.

In the all the recessions I’ve lived through, mass unemployment and record dole queues – despite repeated changes in counting methods were a given. When Thatcher did a three fingered salute on winning her third election victory she was actually signifying three million unemployed. Under Major’s 1990s version, record home repossessions hit families all over the country, sharply at odds with the Tory dream of a property-owning democracy. Interest rates hit 15 per cent and at one point stayed at 10 per cent for a whole year. Yet this time round under Gordon Brown, unemployment did not hit the two million that rightwing analysts predicted, although as a lagging indicator the threat still haunts us.

In truth we went into the election with a situation where, if you were in work and had either a mortgage with (i) a variable rate, (ii) were on the bank’s standard variable rate or took advantage of plummeting interest figures and were able to migrate to a lower fixed rate, you probably had not had as bad a recession as you would have in the 1980s and 1990s. Coupled with this were mortgage protection schemes put into place by the government and, for a whole year, VAT down to 15 per cent for all high street shoppers – mortgage or no mortgage. As an election candidate myself this year I remember making the point on the doorstep. Most voters were hard pressed to name exactly how they lives had become materially worse since the ‘downturn’ (remember how it was Labour who used to avoid the R word?)

Brown’s overall stewardship and Darling’s strategic caution steered us out of choppy waters; results have been harvested in growth that has accrued in figures out under the coalition. Young was right, then, to label it a ‘so-called recession’, although Tory policies still risk a return to a double dip. Bafflingly, it was only a year ago that I heard Vince Cable speak at my workplace of Kingston University where he told us that when recession came Brown had done all the right things: pumping money into the economy and nationalising the banks (whose shares will be sold at a profit) was the correct call. These policies are now bearing fruit, although Vince appears subsequently to have had a complete brain transplant and our fragile recovery is now at risk. The things people will do to get their bums on the back seat of a government Prius.

Of course none of this amelioration of the effects of the downturn is the same thing as ‘having it so good’. Young’s remark that a few thousand public sector jobs lost in a workplace 10s of millions of thousands strong was, as Miliband said, ‘a disgrace’. Any unavoidable job losses because of the Conservatives’ bone-headed dogma is unforgivable – these are people with mouths to feed we’re talking about, not simply boxes on a spreadsheet. Howard Flight, another Tory peer suffering from foot-in-mouth disease, was more on the money when he claimed in rather colourful language that cutting child benefit for the middle classes was wrong. In other words, Ed Miliband was right: the ‘squeezed middle’ will feel the pinch most acutely, having paid into the system all their lives. Following the mythical Worcester woman or Mondeo man, it is this demographic that needs attention. That’s not to say that the white working class should be neglected; the two are not in any way mutually exclusive.

So some elements of Lord Young’s thinking were along the right lines. There are huge qualifications and caveats though. Not everyone is a mortgage payer but, whether they are or not, things are only going to get worse – to clumsily paraphrase D-Ream. The VAT hike to 20 per cent hitting us all waits in the wings despite pre-election assurances to the contrary. This broken promise can be added to the pile along with those on control orders, student tuition fees, child benefit et cetera, et cetera.

Perhaps it is more accurate, then, to say that under Labour things were not as bad as they were in the equivalent point of the recessionary cycle as they were under pre-coalition Tories. If we are to declare, then, that Lord Young was right (or had a point) up to a point, that point was 6 May 2010. With every day that passes since, his utterances become more and more wrong. 

Photo: bisgovuk