Whilst Ed Balls stuck stubbornly to accepting that the economy was now growing rather than “flatlining“, with his disastrous conclusion that you couldn’t fund spending by borrowing in the up-swing, Ed Miliband was absolutely right last year to focus on the cost of living. “The first and last test of economic policy is whether living standards for ordinary families are rising,” he said. And they’re not. Instead we have payday lenders, low-skilled jobs and stagnating wages. Predatory capitalism. Ed Miliband recognised that “the average doesn’t tell you the whole story.”
In their book on the rise of UKIP Revolt on the Right, the new gurus of the topic, Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin explain the rise during the Thatcher and Blair years of the “left behinders” – the crucial group of working class voters who fell behind the average, that once were loyal to Labour and are now moving in their droves to UKIP. Here Ford & Goodwin explain what happened at the hands of Blairite “reformers”: Continue reading
Ed Miliband continues to set the political agenda with his championship of the Living Wage, counterpoising the Tories’ race to the bottom on wages. But there are still important lessons to be drawn on how it is handled. First, it is not enough, as is being proposed at present, to encourage employers ‘voluntarily’ to pay the higher wage of £7.45 an hour (and £8.55 an hour in London) as an 18% rise on the present national minimum wage of £6.31 an hour. A few will comply for good PR prospects, but most will not.