IN WHAT was described as his ‘fightback’ speech, Ed Miliband said that people in work, volunteers and foster-carers will be able to jump council housing queues if he gets into power.

No, they won’t. Just like nothing will be done either about greedy bankers and people sponging off the state – another of Ed’s glib pledges. Because nothing that political leaders promise to do is ever done.

Earlier this week the Conservative party quietly abandoned its plan to reinstate weekly bin collections.

They’re also apparently about to preside over an amnesty for people who shouldn’t be in the UK. Far from watering down the iniquitous Human Rights Act they will now allow paedophiles and rapists to have their names removed from the sex offenders register and paedophiles will be able to halve their sentences for pleading guilty.

As if that weren’t a bad enough rap sheet, Dave has done diddly squat to curb the bonus-hoovering ways of the big banks and neither has he cut NHS waste – the list of boards, committees and time-servers required to run his ‘new’ NHS will probably swallow up any savings.

And don’t get me started on Nick and Vin of the Liberal Democrats, who pledged student tuition fees wouldn’t be hiked and then engineered the mother of all sellouts on that score.

Anyway. The point of all this is that there’s no point in believing a word they say and they should know it. Ed, Dave, Nick are suits full of beggar all – they all look the same and sound the same. They’ll say anything or do anything to get and stay in power. It starts the day they get in office and ends only when their fingers are prized off the door handles as they quit the building.

The policies they espouse do nothing to rectify the monstrous injustice that saw hard-working dad Charles Bunyasi – who was doing an extra day’s work delivering flowers on top of his full-time job for a council when he got run over by a thief who had stolen his van. The coalition’s flawed policies would probably see Mr Bunyasi’s alleged killer serving less time in prison.

It’s one tragic example, but it illustrates how far away from our concerns the politicians have drifted. We want convicted crims to go to prison and to stay there – they want to let them out as soon as possible.

We elect local councils to keep the schools running, empty the bins and mend the streetlights.

But they want to ‘tackle climate change’ or start twinning with obscure cities in Belgium, or send councillors on fact-finding jollies to New Zealand.

I started thinking about all this earlier this week when the BBC screened a programme about Royal Wootton Bassett.

It introduced us to the gentle personalities of those who try to make the repatriation of our war dead just a little bit more bearable. They included the elderly disabled gentleman who collects the bouquet messages at the war memorial, because ‘these things are sacred’ and he doesn’t want them to flutter into the gutter.

There was the Cross Keys pub, which provides free tea and sandwiches for bereaved families and never counts the cost.

And there were the ordinary people who don’t even make it to Wootton Bassett but who line the route of the cortege to pay their respects.

For some reason, of all the moving images, it was this that was the most affecting. Ordinary, decent British people instinctively doing the right thing with no fuss or thought for what they could get out of it.

Especially when you consider that if this ceremony been co-ordinated by Dave, Nick, Ed and their poisonous assistants it would have been despoiled by wrangling, protocol, jockeying for position and spin. The event would be hijacked by diversity officers, climate change committees and a place would probably be set aside for hate-merchants to scream bile in the name of the Human Rights Act.

Thankfully it is not, and that’s why Wootton Basset works.

But the difference between this display of public respect and the conniving, frankly disgusting ways of the people who either lead or would lead this country was searing.