Ed Miliband has poured scorn on the prime minister’s calls for wage rises by condemning the Tories for waiting until the general election year to address “the worst cost of living crisis in more than a century”.
The Labour leader said people would be “choking on their cornflakes” at morning headlines reporting David Cameron’s appeal to businesses to share windfall profits from tumbling global oil prices. In a speech to the Fabian Society on Saturday morning, Miliband said the prime minister was seeking to disguise his repeated failure to maintain or increase average wages in the face of rising costs.
Miliband, whose party maintains a small lead over the Tories in most polls, said: “This is someone who has spent months and years telling us there was no cost of living crisis, and then if there ever was one, it had been fixed.
You couldn’t make it up. Five years of denial, complacency and failure on living standards, and less than four months before an election, he claims to have woken up to the problem.
“You can’t wipe out five years of failure on living standards with pre-election pleading. You can’t magic away people being £1,600 a year worse off by trying to take credit for falling oil prices.”
Miliband’s claims over the prime minister’s failure to deal with stagnating wages and increasing prices had been dealt a blow last week with the news that inflation was at its lowest rate since 2000.
The slide mirrored similar declines across the world in response to the falling price of oil. Miliband, however, confirmed during his speech that the so-called cost of living crisis would remain a central plank of his general election campaign.
Next week, a major report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation is expected to give him further ammunition by exposing the deteriorating prospects of families with children since 2010.
Claiming that the election in May presented the “biggest choice for a generation”, Miliband told a friendly audience: “For the first time since the 1920s, working people will be worse off at the end of a government than they were at the start … “Week after week, month after month, year after year, this government has shown a tin ear for what is really going on.
“They have denied the cost of living crisis. They have been woefully out of touch with the daily struggles of families.
They have rubbished the idea that people are worse off.” The Tories’s economic plans were represented as classic “trickle down” economics by the Labour leader in a well-received speech. Miliband said the country needed a new plan under which the deficit would be cut but public services would not be “shredded”.
He said: “The Tories’ governing mission is this: Reduce government to its very core, cut services to the bone, give huge tax cuts to the very wealthiest and let powerful interests have things all their own way, and then sit back and hope the country will somehow succeed. But it has failed.”
He also rejected the language of the UK Independence party and those on the right of the Conservative party, by speaking of the benefits of immigration to the British economy while pledging that wages of British workers would not be allowed to be unfairly undercut by those coming from abroad. He said: “Immigration makes us stronger, richer and more powerful as a nation.
“But making immigration work for everyone and not just a few means people should contribute before they claim and we should never, ever allow companies to undercut wages and conditions of workers here by paying slave wages to those brought in from overseas.”
Miliband also criticised the prime minister for his failure to commit to TV debates during the general election campaign, claiming Cameron was desperate because he “knows he has failed”.
“That’s one of the reasons he is running from debates. He is neither proud of his record nor confident about his plans for the future,” he said. “Why did the chicken cross the road? To avoid the TV election debates,” he added to the applause of the hundreds of delegates at the conference.
theguardian.com
The Labour leader said people would be “choking on their cornflakes” at morning headlines reporting David Cameron’s appeal to businesses to share windfall profits from tumbling global oil prices. In a speech to the Fabian Society on Saturday morning, Miliband said the prime minister was seeking to disguise his repeated failure to maintain or increase average wages in the face of rising costs.
Miliband, whose party maintains a small lead over the Tories in most polls, said: “This is someone who has spent months and years telling us there was no cost of living crisis, and then if there ever was one, it had been fixed.
You couldn’t make it up. Five years of denial, complacency and failure on living standards, and less than four months before an election, he claims to have woken up to the problem.
“You can’t wipe out five years of failure on living standards with pre-election pleading. You can’t magic away people being £1,600 a year worse off by trying to take credit for falling oil prices.”
Miliband’s claims over the prime minister’s failure to deal with stagnating wages and increasing prices had been dealt a blow last week with the news that inflation was at its lowest rate since 2000.
The slide mirrored similar declines across the world in response to the falling price of oil. Miliband, however, confirmed during his speech that the so-called cost of living crisis would remain a central plank of his general election campaign.
Next week, a major report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation is expected to give him further ammunition by exposing the deteriorating prospects of families with children since 2010.
Claiming that the election in May presented the “biggest choice for a generation”, Miliband told a friendly audience: “For the first time since the 1920s, working people will be worse off at the end of a government than they were at the start … “Week after week, month after month, year after year, this government has shown a tin ear for what is really going on.
“They have denied the cost of living crisis. They have been woefully out of touch with the daily struggles of families.
They have rubbished the idea that people are worse off.” The Tories’s economic plans were represented as classic “trickle down” economics by the Labour leader in a well-received speech. Miliband said the country needed a new plan under which the deficit would be cut but public services would not be “shredded”.
He said: “The Tories’ governing mission is this: Reduce government to its very core, cut services to the bone, give huge tax cuts to the very wealthiest and let powerful interests have things all their own way, and then sit back and hope the country will somehow succeed. But it has failed.”
He also rejected the language of the UK Independence party and those on the right of the Conservative party, by speaking of the benefits of immigration to the British economy while pledging that wages of British workers would not be allowed to be unfairly undercut by those coming from abroad. He said: “Immigration makes us stronger, richer and more powerful as a nation.
“But making immigration work for everyone and not just a few means people should contribute before they claim and we should never, ever allow companies to undercut wages and conditions of workers here by paying slave wages to those brought in from overseas.”
Miliband also criticised the prime minister for his failure to commit to TV debates during the general election campaign, claiming Cameron was desperate because he “knows he has failed”.
“That’s one of the reasons he is running from debates. He is neither proud of his record nor confident about his plans for the future,” he said. “Why did the chicken cross the road? To avoid the TV election debates,” he added to the applause of the hundreds of delegates at the conference.
theguardian.com
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