"Hard working families"

I'm right there, boiling with you, MamaCaz. I'm setting off for a tropical island somewhere and just coming back in time to vote. Anyone want to come?

Yes please

Only if I can have a postal vote!

Me too - they are only working their tripe out and seeing so little of their children because they cannot afford a home unless they do! Rather than subsidise child care, perhaps it would be better to ensure families can make a living wage without having to be out of the home all the time.

Yes I agree, I think it's become THE defining cliche of this election, how they love trotting it out, DC likes to roll his shirt sleeves up so we know he's from a hard working family I have yet to see Ed roll his sleeves up, but perhaps he does when he's cleaning his kitchens!

Haha, yes, where are all these hard working families? I am pretty lazy myself.

Include me in! Makes my blood boil when they come out with this claptrap. My young next door neighbour is the breadwinner whilst his partner is looking after their new baby and toddler. She doesn't get maternity leave because she had a zero hours contract. If she went back, she couldn't plan nursery hours needed because of the unreliability of her job. He has three zero hours contract jobs and gets called out at very short notice, so family time can't be planned. A living wage and one job each is their ambition.

Are there no hard-working single people, widows, widowers, childless couples, etc.?

They never give a definition of what a hard-working family is. How do they decide who is hardworking and who is not. What effect the difference will have on their entitlement to benefits and help, plus of course absents comments.

I've always assumed it's a bit of psychology, designed to make "benefit scroungers" feel uncomfortable.

I don't think the phrase is meant to make "benefit scroungers" feel uncomfortable so much as to make people who have got jobs, especially those whose pay is low, feel resentful towards the "benefit scroungers".

Benefit scroungers will never feel uncomfortable but it makes genuine claimants like me feel very uncomfortable.

That's why crun and I put benefit scroungers in inverted commas. It's very hard on genuine claimants to hear this pejorative description.

Annoying as it sounds I think the term is meant to make those poor young people trying to juggle children, childcare and work feel better about themselves , and tries to put the message across that their valuable contribution to society is appreciated.

And as for all those lessons they have learned .................... ! We must now be heading for Utopia !

Repeating hard working families makes some feel smug, chips away at the self esteem of the disabled, unemployed , those struggling on minimum wage, this government has no interest in making people feel better about themselves , just words to create an even bigger devide and gain votes.

Well we were a hard working family and now I am a hard working retiree in a different, unpaid, way!

IMO it is a way of simply saying "I'm on your side*. EM is hoping it will make most people feel included.

I hate: hard working families and lessons will be learned. Both are trite meaningless expressions due to overuse by people who think we, the electorate, are all stupid people who believe in meaningless platitudes. I think the expression hard working families lost any meaning when we saw coal miners protesting against losing their jobs, a long long time ago. I was quite young and naiive then, and never could understand why people were being criticised and pilloried for wanting to work and provide for their families, isnt this what society is all about?

In a word....aaaaarrrgghh!!

I'm already glowering at my radio and we still have weeks to go!

'Let me be clear about...' usually when they want to be as obfuscatory as possible.

When I hear "hard-working families ...", it comes across to me as just another snipe at the poor.
Because of all the other rhetoric that accompanies it each time, it is clearly meant to be interpreted as meaning "all those of you who aren't benefit scroungers".
But where does that leave the working poor, those who work a full week, many doing several small jobs and very unsociable hours to try to make ends meet, but who still don't scrape together enough to get by without a few pounds of benefit to top it up? To me, it comes across as a big insult to a lot of people.

Thousands on zero contracts want to be hard workers , but difficult if some weeks they just work three hours

Anniebach: I quite agree!