Hard working families don't go to the toilet in the middle of the road ...

Robert Shrimsley (Financial Times, needed subscription, hence the Google link) takes the piss out of Michael Howard, and the most irritating phrase the campaign has come up with.

Look at the amount of hits "hard working families" gets in Google news, from both Labour and the Cons (and probablt Lib Dems too, if you look down the list):

http://news.google.co.uk/news?q=%22hard%20working%20families%22&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&sa=N&tab=wn

Is everyone else as fed up with it as I am?

is he serious?

The women's winner (Paula Radcliffe) did indeed crouch down and piss in the road (at the side, not the middle, but it was still live on national TV - I saw it, but wasn't quite sure what was happening- the camera didn't do a close up).

...what should have Paula Radcliffe done? :bounce:

unless your intention is to distinguish them from another section of the population which you intend to portray as indigent and unworthy of support. I assume the latter group includes all unemployed single people, state pensioners, the disabled, single parents, gypsies, asylum seekers etc (add group to list as appropriate). You can trace the origins of this idea right back to the Elizabethan Poor Law of the 16th Century with its concept of sturdy beggars and the undeserving poor.

On Edit - As for poor old Paula did n't her mum warn her to use the lavatory before she left home. She should know that you can not rely on public toilets being available when you need one.

...on the subject of "the reach-for-the-revolver, repeated so often it can induce despair" catchphrase of the election.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1468434,00.html

This year the reach-for-the-revolver phrase, repeated so often it can induce despair, is "hard-working families". Open the paper, switch on the radio, watch the television; it will come along soon enough: not once, twice or three times but again and again. This time, though, it isn't just one party that's using it. Blair invokes hard-working families - but so does Michael Howard, doubling the strike rate.

Who's to blame? As so often, look to America. The granddaddy of the hard-working family, so to speak, was Bill Clinton. In his 1992 campaign he spoke of "the families who work hard and play by the rules". That was a neat way of signalling his New Democrat credentials, paying due homage to family values, the work ethic and intolerance of crime in a single sentence.

It is hardly an accidental coinage. Political insiders admit the phrase has been market-tested to within an inch of its life and that it consistently "resonates" with focus groups. That's not so surprising: for a three-word phrase, it ticks a rare number of boxes.

What both parties like is the phrase's nod to an increasingly important agenda, one cherished by 2005's favourite demographic, the "school-gate mums" (soccer moms, in US parlance). Work-life balance, childcare provision, the sharing of domestic chores - somehow it all seems to be there in that single phrase. "It's rather like that Abbey National slogan, 'Because life's complicated enough,' " says my friendly strategist. "It says, 'I know how difficult things are out there. I understand.' "