Voters are not 'lurching', they're responding to elitism

Will it become again (or remain, depending on your point of view) a free-trading bloc, or will it morph into an emerging super-state, built upon a complete political and economic union?

There is ample evidence that the latter is the preferred option of the EU leadership itself - something that has in recent times begun to raise concerns in normally pro-EU Germany.

Whilst there was doubtless an element of protest voting in Sunday's election results, it is disingenuous to suggest that people were simply ticking the first box they could find that said 'none of the above'.

Many may have been protesting, but they were not lurching. The shift is premeditated, though less on the basis of any new-found party affiliation - arguably, people vote less and less on institutional grounds - than on alignment with ideas on specific issues.

Some newspaper political editors seem to struggle to find the right form of words for a shift they surely saw coming and for which they had ample time to prepare.

Perhaps the choice of headlines reflects that newspaper elites are too cosy with their political counterparts, or at least too much like them in terms of the context of their experience.

Both are either geographically or at least culturally located within middle class cosmopolitan enclaves in major urban centres. As such they may be, by virtue of income levels and other markers of social experience, far removed from the on-the-ground concerns and fears of the average voter.

In the political sphere, it is this perceived willful elitism that I think most concerns the voters who are ready to abandon traditional parties.

In recent times, people of all political persuasions have begun to ask the following questions, in one form or another, with justification: 'How can Oxford PPE graduates, who become MPs or staffers on both sides of politics, understand my everyday concerns? Especially when they move seamlessly from university into politics without any work experience beyond politics?'

Last week Ed Miliband's minders played into this general perception of politics-without-a-common-touch when they allowed photographers to snap their leader battling - to the death, it seemed - a humble sandwhich.

The photos quickly went viral online and added to the notion that one of Britain's foremost political leaders, while waxing lyrical on the minutiae of policy, can't handle something as mundane as everyday lunch food.

In the same week, while making the cost-of-living his cause celebre, the Labour leader showed that he has little grasp of how much it costs for normal folks to fill their grocery baskets.