Nick Clegg to speak up for 'alarm clock Britain' - The Guardian

Nick Clegg to speak up for 'alarm clock Britain'. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/PA

Nick Clegg will today begin his campaign to speak up for what he describes as "alarm clock Britain" – people on middle and low incomes who are anxious about their standard of living – when he visits a building merchant's yard in south London to meet shift workers loading trucks.

He has been working on the concept – his version of Ed Miliband's "squeezed middle" – for months, holding seminars with policy experts such as the Resolution Foundation, as well as the Cabinet Office, and sees the group as being defined as much by character as income levels.

The key characteristics of alarm clock Britons are that they rise early, at present in the dark, work long, sometimes unpredictable shifts for relatively little money, and play by the rules. They resent those not in work and on welfare.

Clegg, who points to his policy of taking low-income groups out of basic-rate tax by raising allowances, has been frustrated that his single most important tax policy, adopted by the coalition government and incorporated in the budget, has been drowned out in the discussion of spending cuts.

David Laws, the former Treasury chief secretary, has been deployed to work through the policy implications, including for tax credits, home ownership and even pensions. One policy implication is likely to be extra help for this group to find affordable private-sector rented accommodation. The development of the theme is also intriguing since it looks as if Clegg is trying to work up a distinctive Liberal Democrat policy agenda. At one point he was going to call the group early birds – an idea that has echoes of Nicholas Sarkozy's campaign slogan phrase la France qui se lève tôt – France that gets up early. Sarkozy first used the speech in March 2005 at the National Council of the UMP, and has repeatedly returned to the theme with varying degrees of success.

But the policy also draws on work being done by the US vice President Joe Biden.

In an interview yesterday Clegg emphasised his policy of increasing personal allowances. He said: "We are going to put £200 back in the pocket of every single basic rate taxpayer from 5 April onwards, and by the end of this Parliament it will be £700, as we move towards this central pledge of making sure that no one pays any income tax on the first £10,000 they earn."

Gavin Kelly, a former aide to Gordon Brown, now beginning to dominate the market analysing the phenomenon of squeezed Britons, has been one of the people putting forward ideas for low and middle income Britain.

He said yesterday: "I am supportive about the perfectly reasonable objective of raising personal allowances, but the Liberal Democrats have to think all this through. A tax cut of £200 will receive no thanks from the public if it comes alongside other cuts to benefits that make working families much worse off, and that's before the rise in VAT which will set back the average middle income family by £200.

"The impact of the cut in support for childcare which means many working women will lose an average of nearly £500 from April. That has the potential to be political poison. Similarly there has been little discussion about the impact of national insurance changes, which will benefit the very poorest income tax payers but hurt those basic rate taxpayers and above earning £25,000.

"They also need to rethink their attitude to public services. If they want to help those working unpredictable shifts, then they have to talk about issues like expanding Breakfast clubs and and early morning GP access, issues about which they have said little, partly because they are opposed to public service guarantees."