SHADOW health minister Liz Kendall believes that she has hit the jackpot in winning the backing of Chuka Umunna for the Labour Party leadership election.

The shadow business secretary makes no secret of his political preferences in his support for Kendall.

"For us, our next leader must get this vision right. On all these big subjects, Liz Kendall has asked the tough questions and started to chart a course to the answers. She has been courageous in challenging conventional wisdom," he wrote in the New Statesman.

Beware of any politician with easy recourse to the word "tough". It is usually shorthand for kicking the working class in the teeth.

It certainly does not herald principled opposition to what threatens to be five years of hard labour for working people as the Tories press ahead with their project of dismantling gains delivered by Clem Attlee's post-war Labour government.

Far from opposing Tory plans, Kendall is clear that she would not only meet them halfway but even try to outflank them on the right.

David Cameron has fallen short of committing his government to the Nato-recommended target of devoting 2 per cent of GDP on military expenditure.

Kendall, on the other hand, is gung-ho for the full 2 per cent, insisting that, "under my leadership, Labour will no longer stand by while the Prime Minister weakens our country and allows the world to become less secure."

Cameron explains his decision to spend less than 2 per cent on defence by citing the need to control public spending, while Kendall plumps for splurging £35bn a year on post-imperial swaggering without explaining which public services would be slashed to finance it. 

Cuts there certainly would be if Kendall were to be successful, because she identifies herself with public service "reform."

Just so that there should be no misunderstanding, her idea of reform does not include taking national assets such as rail, water, gad and electricity that have delivered sky-high private profits and lousy service to consumers back into public ownership.

Her commitment to private ownership and market forces is total, as she confirms with her enthusiastic backing for the Tories' free schools programme.

"I'm not going to waste time obsessing about school structures," she says in a rewind of Tony Blair's duplicitous "what works" justification for private-sector penetration of public services.

With such touching faith in the market, it is no surprise that Kendall will have no truck with Ed Miliband's modest proposal for a temporary freeze on energy prices, relying on supposed competition to look after consumer needs.

After all, that's worked pretty well in the past, hasn't it?

That's why we have seen half a million households, in which the poorest people live, forced to accept prepayment meters so as to guarantee no unpaid bills for member companies of the private energy cartel.

These people are not Kendall's priority. She wants Labour to not only understand business "but be the champion of people who take a risk, create something, build it up and make a success of it."

She can't be accused of being mealy-mouthed. Her commitment to the corporate sector is open and unambiguous.

It is equally clear that working class aspirations to well paid employment, workplace rights, affordable rented or mortgaged accommodation, decent benefits and pensions and the kind of social wage and healthcare introduced after the war will, at best, come a poor second in any Liz Kendall premiership.