Tom Peck's Sketch: Don’t worry, little people - Iain Duncan Smith has got your back in the EU referendum

This was not an appeal to those at the bottom to act in their interest and Vote Leave. This was an instruction to the rich to do their bit for social justice by voting out, whatever the cost

(EPA)

Finally, someone is speaking up for the little guy. No longer will this referendum be decided by five Nato secretary-generals, 100 business leaders, twenty former Masterchef finalists and one 1981 Ashes Headingley Test winning accidental dick-pic tweeter, because, at last, someone’s picking up the fight for the man in the street.

You know, the average Joe, the ordinary guy, The one you see every day, happily hobbling to the factory and back, clutching his Atos assessment, paying his tax on his unoccupied boxroom, working hard, getting on.

Well worry no longer, because IDS, Man of The People, Champion of The Poor, has got your back.

“The EU, despite its grand early intentions, has become a friend of the haves rather than the have-nots,” he said, in his speech at the Vote Leave HQ by Lambeth Bridge in London, right in the heart of the Westminster Bubble. Twenty-four hours earlier, this was where Boris Johnson had stood and made the “liberal, cosmopolitan case for Brexit”. Now, it was why those liberal, cosmopolitan types, with their corporate jobs and their homes that they own were all in hoc to the EU superstate.

“The EU is working well for big banks,“ Mr Duncan Smith said. “The bailouts being financed by extreme levels of austerity in countries like Greece have largely benefited financial institutions that lent irresponsibly before the crash.”

That’s your simple, plain vanilla banker-bashing there. Always a winner. Nothing derivated, nothing securitised.

He carried on: “The EU is also working for corporations that benefit from mass immigration... the big corporates with large lobbying operations in Brussels.”

It’s Coke and McDonalds, flooding the UK with Bulgarians, paying them sod all, taking British jobs and having their wages topped up by British taxpayers.

Nothing was sacred. The Olympics came in for a kicking next. “Despite the all the statements about the Olympic Park helping British workers, we now know that nearly half of all the jobs on the site went to foreign nationals,” he said.

It’s potent stuff, all this. And effective too. Labour’s Frank Field was saying much the same on this same stage last week. That it’s more than OK to object to the pressure put on British wages by migrant labour. But IDS went further. This was not an appeal to those at the bottom to act in their interest and Vote Leave. This was an instruction to the rich to do their bit for social justice by voting out, whatever the cost.

“And this takes me back to my central appeal to what I think are the best, compassionate instincts of the British people,” he said. “When you vote on 23 June, even if you believe what you are being told by those who want to remain in the EU; that you may have done OK from the EU – think about the people who haven’t.”

So there we have it. This is the kind of radical thinking that will be missed around the Cabinet table. Vote not for you, but for what you might do for your fellow man. Has anyone ever asked a Turkey to think of his civic responsibility for feeding the poor, when the big Christmas vote comes round each year? The results might be dramatic. Or they might not. We’ll see on 23 June.