Labour's ideas are a recipe for disaster Ed Miliband has been talking a lot about living standards lately. His strategists think this is the way to get the middle-class vote, tapping in to the deep well of resentment over rising prices and stagnating incomes. Energy and food prices are up. Low interest rates are hurting savers. And fiscal drag has pushed millions of middle-income earners into the higher tax bracket. These are all the right ingredients for an anti-Tory backlash - but what Mr Miliband offers the voters is, in reality, a recipe for disaster. First, there was his pledge to freeze energy bills. That promise is an empty one: no national government can control global wholesale prices. Yet despite being impotent, the proposal spooked the markets. Nearly £1 billion was wiped off the value of energy giant Centrica after Mr Miliband spoke. On Friday, history repeated itself when Mr Miliband gave a speech in which he pledged a "reckoning" with the banks - and £1 billion was immediately lost from the value of the state-owned banks. You might call it déjà vu. A future Labour government, said Mr Miliband, would impose a cap on the market share that any one bank can have in personal accounts and small business lending, and the two partially state-owned banks would be broken up to help create at least two "challenger banks." While breaking the high street monopoly of big lenders might sound like a good idea, government intervention into the market in this manner rarely works out well. There is also precious little evidence of investor interest, and serious mistakes made in the past have left experts wary of the potential for success. Recall the disaster when the Co-op tried to take over hundreds of Lloyds branches, a deal that nearly broke the bank. What the middle classes really need is relief from punitive taxes. That Mr Miliband prefers to lay out his own vision of social democracy, rather than discuss the practical details of people's problems shows that he does not understand the audience he is trying to address. Worse, his impractical policies would damage the economic recovery. That would make the middle class - and everyone else - poorer, not richer.