Ed Miliband complains that "the middle class, once the solid centre of our economy, is being hollowed out with growing insecurity and the prospect, for the first time since the war, that their children will be worse off than they are."

By coincidence that's what's happening to the working class, but it doesn't get a mention.

Marxists, including Miliband's father Ralph, recognise that Britain's industrial revolution, pre-eminent trading status and national wealth were capitalised by imperial conquest and overseas exploitation.

Domestically, the hewing of coal, production of steel, processing of metals, timber and other materials into finished goods and their transport to markets by road, rail, sea and air were all carried out by the working class, providing huge profits for capitalists.

Yet, according to Miliband, it was the middle class that created this wealth.

Miliband uses the terms middle class, middle income and middle Britain interchangeably, compressing these sectors into his mythical "squeezed middle."

What does he think that the working class does with its time these days?

There are no longer huge detachments of workers in the extractive and metal-bashing industries. The economy has changed, productive processes have developed and computerisation has transformed the world of work.

But members of the working class still make the economy tick.

Their labour power provides the profits to allow a tiny minority of society to live in luxury while lecturing us all to work harder and appreciate the "real world."

The working class has always been menaced by unemployment, with a minority denied a job and told that their state benefits could be withdrawn unless they undercut the wages negotiated by unions for employed workers.

Holding down or, even better for the capitalist class, reducing benefits is the favoured means of Establishment politicians to increase the desperation of the unemployed.

That's why Miliband's decision to order Labour MPs to vote for George Osborne's policy of setting a welfare benefit cap in stone for future governments is a betrayal of not only claimants but of the entire working class.

Miliband condemns the Chancellor's economic programme as a "race to the bottom," in which "wages for most people will continue to lag far behind the wealth being created and middle-income families will still be locked out of the benefits of growth."

But by supporting Osborne's welfare cap, the Labour leader is throwing in his hand with the most viciously right-wing government in living memory.

Worse still, by championing the "living standards of middle Britain" while agreeing to screw the worst-off workers living on reduced benefits, Miliband drives a wedge into working-class solidarity.

He recognises the reality of Britain's economy in which "a few people at the top scoop more and more of the rewards."

Yet, in contrast to his willingness to put the boot into those at the bottom of the heap, he has no plan to drive greater social justice by raising taxation on the avaricious elite enriching itself on the backs of the working class, including Miliband's "squeezed middle."

Miliband has clearly been influenced by US politics where the working class has been consigned to obscurity as a communist concept and the vast majority of the country are redesignated middle class.

It's nonsense across the pond and it's no less ridiculous here.

The working class cannot be wished away or neglected on a political whim, as Miliband may yet discover to his cost.