HARD-WORKING families – politicians can't get enough of them. They only have to open their mouths and the words pop right out, slicked in the saliva of easy opportunism.

Well, that's the way it seems sometimes.

The Tories have long rested a faux-paternal arm round the shoulders of those who toil. David Cameron and George Osborne appear to regard these people as their own. More recently Ed Miliband's Labour Party has got in on the act in a bit of copy-cat politicking.

So now both parties lay claim to hard-working families. And really it's about time it stopped.

There are a number of objections to be made. Here's one for starters. Hard-working could apply to all sorts of people conducting all sorts of tasks. Some criminals work very hard, while drug barons probably work hard at what they do too.

High-flying bankers almost certainly work hard. Even if some of them were working hard at screwing up the economy on a grand scale. And incidentally – and I do like an incidentally – isn't it remarkable the way in which a financial crisis caused in large part by the private banking industry has been used by the Coalition government as a stick with which to beat all publicly run services and organisations?

Many of those public-sector workers who went on strike last week will have been hard-working, if not on Thursday. Some will have been working hard for years for not very much money.

This isn't to support or decry those who took part in the mass walkout. It is just to say something obvious: lots of people work hard, but not all of them are handsomely rewarded for doing so.

Here's a further objection: if families do indeed work hard, as many do, then why should their efforts be used to underpin the architecture of political point-scoring?

It's as if the politicians (of whatever persuasion) suppose that once we hear mention of "hard-working families" we will all sit there like nodding dogs while thinking: "Ah, yes, that's me they're talking about. They'll certainly be getting my vote."

My mention earlier of hard-working criminals was not meant entirely seriously, but the point remains that hard work of itself isn't necessarily a virtue. It's also not exactly a uniquely defining characteristic, as most people work hard.

So it's time to rise up and tell politician A, B or C (pick any you like; they're all at it) to stop praising us for our hard work. People work hard for a number of reasons, but often because they have to and that's the way life is.

There's nothing wrong with hard work, of course. But there is something amiss with us all being conveniently lumped together for our industriousness.

And here's another thing – and I do like to see one of those tagging breathlessly along. Perhaps instead of praising hard-working families, the Government should wonder why people have to work so hard in this country. Wouldn't it be refreshing to hear a Prime Minister say that the people of Britain were working too much and that they ought to have a longer weekend.

The York-born author and occasional columnist Andrew Martin said in a column in The Guardian the other week that there should be a fixed three-day weekend for all. He argued that this would do away with the "miserable Sunday" feeling, while also giving us all more time to relax.

Andrew also lamented the loss of the old-fashioned Sunday when almost everything was shut. I'm with him on that one. When we moved to York more than 25 years ago, nearly all the shops were shuttered on Sunday. You could wander the mostly empty streets just looking.

The sleepy Sabbath went a long time ago and, in truth, not many people would want it back, I guess. But even an atheist who likes the occasional bit of shopping can see that there was something cleansing about not being able to buy stuff for one quiet day.

And here's another thought. To see how ridiculous it is to praise hard-working families, just imagine a politician saying the opposite: "We want to stand by lazy-arsed families who can hardly be bothered to raise their fat behinds from the sofa..."