to feel abit sorry for ed milliband and his comment on grocery shopping

[Ohnonotagen]

I'm not a labour supporter so don't often feel sorry for him but was on holiday this week and so watched GMTV (or whatever its called these days) and the presenter asked him how much the average family spent on groceries each week and he said "we spend £70 or £80 at least" then the presenter said the average family of 4 spend at least £100 and made him out to be really out of touch. Well i'm not sure of Ed's family size and we're only a family of 3 and i spend about £60 to £70 a week on shopping so i didn't think his estimate was too unrealistic. Now i'm back from holidays and just catching up on my recorded emmerdale episodes and they keep replaying this clip in the breaks to demonstrate how out of touch he is. i'm thinking its a case of 'dammed whatever he says'. If asked the same questions and he said 'yes me and the family spend an average of £150 per week' i can't see that having gone down any better.

This kind of thing makes me cross too. I don't care if he spends two quid on a loaf of bread either.

I have no idea what we spend. There are 2 adults and 4 cats. We don't do a weekly shop. It's done roughly turn and turn about as and when there is nothing left to eat but whoever does it pays for it. We don't have a household budget or a joint account. Mine will be skewed by £20-£30 on flowers and his will be skewed by bottles of artisan beer(although not as much as mine will be)

I do

Oops! I don't give a shit what he spends on shopping, I just want him to start saying something!!

We spend around £50-60 for three of us, so what he said sounds about right to me for four. I was surprised to see him criticised for this.

Yabu, just shows he talks bollocks. Damned no matter what he said so why not tell the truth?

Pretty sure the truth was "I've not got a clue I don't do the shopping"

He response to his ignorance of his domestic set up and costs is quite muted compared to some I've seen in the past.

I do - but to be fair I guess he isn't home at half five for his dinner every night and I can't see him taking a sarnie and smart price crisps to work for his lunch.

He probably only eats what 3 breakfasts and maybe 2 dinners at home in a week.

So really it's only 1 adult, however many kids + a ready meal or two for him.

He is kind of busy to do much shopping or keep track of the family spending I would guess.

The whole thing just shows the ridiculous way things are reported.

If he said £70-80 at least then he wasn't wrong.

It isn't a big deal.

I suppose his mistake was actually saying a figure. He should have fudged it.

It has done damage. Hardened labour supporters interviewed stated that comment had changed their vote.

I agree. We spend around £70-80 a week in the supermarket every week for the 4 of us. I'm not sure why that's seen as amazingly low. It's not like he claimed he was feeding his family on £30 a week or something.

I feel sorry for him and I like him.

But when I thought about it some more, I realised that one of his major campaigning issues is the "cost of living" and "squeezed middle" and therefore he should ask his advisers and teenage scribblers to give him all the facts about what the cost of living is for the average person. Otherwise it just looks like he is not serious about it and the whole "cost of living" issue is just a stunt to fool the voters and bash the Tories with.

It's weird that all parties utter complete, demonstrable falsehoods to further their agenda with alarming regularity which go under the radar (read some of Ben Goldacre's stuff) but this is the sort of fluff that gets seized on. Don't care if he spends £70 or £300, just what he'd do if elected.

It was a lose-lose question. If he doesn't know but then says that he doesn't know, he'd get a pasting.

But it's not that weird, really, is it? You don't have to earn too much to not be too bothered about your shop. As in, you know you can't afford Argentinian steak but you can do an average shop and pick up what you'd like without paying too much attention. Plus if you do lots of little shops rather than one big shop, it's hard to keep track.

It's one of the odder things I've seen people focus on.

"and the presenter asked him how much the average family spent on groceries each week and he said "we spend £70 or £80 at least"

The thing is if the question was what does the average family spend then he should know because he is making a big issue out of the "cost of living" and is saying that Cameron and co are out of touch with the public's concerns.

He and the Labour party spend a lot of time painting the Tories as rich fuckers out of touch with the rest of the public. He did not want to tell the truth as he is as rich as the Tories and that doesn't play well, so he would rather lie than give his excess to charity.

hmm suppose thinking about it that way then if he is focusing on how much average families are being squeezed then maybe should have all his facts and figures to hand. Thinking about it i suppose what threw me is that the average family spend more than £100 a week!! We don't scrimp and save and spend loads less than this.

I don't like him much but he wasn't that far out. A bit on the low side. Anyway why would anyone expect a man to know that. He's not Thatcher with her shopping basket.

If he wants to present himself as a man of the people and not an out of touch elitist snob (which he is, let's face it) he needs to do his homework a bit better. Labour have a major problem with most of their cabinet members coming from very privileged backgrounds with little to no work experience outside of politics, yet trying to appeal to their traditional core voters of working-class people. There's a major disconnect.

Well I know when DD3 is home we spend around £70 a week and that is for 3 adults, So I think his comment wasn't actually far out for 2 adults and 2 children,

£70-80 would be average for us as a family of four. I like ed. he seems quite decent though I suspect his weekly shop is way more than that. As will be DCs...obviously.