Test your political knowledge and acumen: the answer

Yesterday I posed this puzzler:

Which year was this observation made and, for double bragging rights, by who?

The tit-for-tat arguments presented in ‘balanced’ television programmes may have helped to confuse the public’s sense of the differences between the parties, and to add to their cynicism about any party’s claims to have a monopoly of wisdom. The idea that one party represented the working class and the other the middle and upper class hardly fitted the predominantly middle class university graduate character of the two front benches.

The answer? David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh in the book on the 1979 general election, published in 1980. Yet they are just the sorts of complaints that people make frequently about politics today. Some things in politics never really change…