NEWLY ELECTED Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, faced with allegations that he is now in thrall to the trade unions after they backed him in the leadership race, has acknowledged that some public sector workers would have lost their jobs if Labour had won May’s election, but he insisted that the planned Conservative/Liberal Democrat cutbacks would go too far and must be opposed.
Rejecting as “tiresome rubbish” charges that he is “Red Ed”, Mr Miliband, who defeated his brother, David, on the final count by the narrowest of margins, issued a call to the middle classes for support.
He said he was determined that Labour would be “on the side of the squeezed middle in our country and everyone who has worked hard and wants to get on” and that it would never lose touch again with the political centre-ground.
Mr Miliband was elected with 50.65 per cent of the vote on the fourth round, compared with his brother’s 49.35 per cent.
Opponents inside and outside Labour complained that he had done so on the back of support from the UK’s three most powerful unions, who urged members to vote for him and who lobbied Labour MPs who had backed other candidates to give him second preferences.
The new Labour leader insisted that he would not be in debt to the unions – which no longer command bloc votes in Labour’s election battles, but who can and do offer guidance to members.
“I’m nobody’s man, I’m my own man and I’m very very clear about that,” he said.
“I’m certainly not Bob Crow’s man .”
However, Len McCluskey, who is the favourite in the battle to head up the UK’s largest union, Unite, said Mr Miliband’s victory had “redrawn” the political battle-lines.
“It re-establishes Labour as an unashamedly centre-left party ready and willing to challenge the economic and political orthodoxies of the last generation,” he declared in an article written for the Guardian’s website.
The leaders of the largest unions, including Unite and Unison, met in June to decide how best to stop Mr Miliband’s brother becoming leader, opting to back the younger Miliband when it became clear that their favoured candidate, Ed Balls, could not win.
Questioned about his attitude to strikes, Mr Miliband again struck for the centre-ground in his first interview since his victory with the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, saying only that he believed that strikes were “a sign of failure” mounted only after negotiations had broken down. “We’re not going to have a whole long list of unheroic failures of the trade union movement as we have in the past,” he said.
So far, Mr Miliband has been careful in his declarations about the attitude Labour will adopt on cutting the deficit, though it is clear that he wishes to row back on the plans left by Labour’s chancellor Alistair Darling to cut it in half within five years.
The Darling plan was “the right starting point”, he said yesterday, adding that there was “some more that we could do on tax”, but he is wary of allowing himself to be presented, particularly, by the Conservatives as being one who is pledged to higher taxes for the middle classes.
Besides increased taxation on the banks, he favours the creation of a high pay commission, though it is not clear how this would be able to set limits on top pay levels, particularly in the mobile financial services industry.
In addition, he wants the introduction of “a living wage”, which would be higher than the existing minimum wage, and graduate taxes for those educated in college, instead of the government’s preference for higher tuition fees.