I'm not saying Labour are guaranteed to be working for the people.

I think they do, by and large, genuinely try to work for ordinary people. But:

There's an very large gap in day to day experience between its leaders and most voters. I do think that is inevitable, even if the politician comes from a poor/underpriveleged background, just because of the sheer amount of time they have to spend with other politicians and within the Westminster bubble. Then, that applies all the more if they come from a middle-class intelligentsia background like Ed Miliband, and twice over again if they come from full on Eton/Oxford/Bullingdon.

They are not able to be fully honest about the limitations which they feel (and are probably correct to feel) are placed on them while operating as a relatively small player in a global economy. For instance, Miliband was weak on HSBC - lots of 'there's a bigger issue', 'of course, if they've done something wrong, they should be punished' and 'we will look at...'. The reason is that financial services have been responsible for a majority of all growth in the UK over the last 20 years, and the government is massively dependent on them to pay for any increases in public spending, or even just balancing the books.

There is a huge amount of meaningful change that can happen, but a lot of things that people want will not happen, because even someone who wants to act solely in the interests of ordinary people will not be able to justify (or even just manage) the loss in revenues which would follow from seriously pursuing financial crimes, and putting the hundreds of bankers in jail that deserve to be there because of what, in any other walk of life, would be called fraud. But if you want that, Miliband is definitely the person to vote for - his 'good business, bad business' rhetoric has been going on for a long time, and there is significant disquiet that he might actually do what he says he's going to do, to intervene into the economy and regulate it in an active way.