The first big political event of the new year will be the Commons vote on the Welfare Uprating Bill, which will enshrine in law George Osborne’s plan to increase benefits by just 1 per cent per annum for the next three years (well below the rate of inflation). Ed Miliband’s new year message, which you can watch above, offers further evidence of how he intends to challenge the Conservatives’ welfare myths.
The Labour leader draws on a recent visit to a food bank to reject the stereotype of the welfare ‘scrounger’ presented by the Tories’ recent campaign ads. He says:
I also met some of the people using the food bank, some of them out of work and some of them in work.
The story that stuck with me the most was a man who told me his story he said: “I walked eleven miles to a job interview because I couldn’t afford the bus fare, I got the job then I walked eleven miles back,” he was still looking for somewhere to live because he hadn’t got his first pay cheque and he was using the food bank.
Such a long way away from the normal stereotype you’d have about the people using food banks.
When Miliband raised the subject of food banks at the final PMQs of the year, some Conservatives accused him of painting an implausible picture of a Dickensian Britain of poverty and woe. But the Labour leader’s decision to return to the subject shows that he believes the growth of food banks, which have increased six-fold in the last three years, is emblematic of all that has gone wrong with the UK economy.
Perhaps the most striking line in Miliband’s message is his assertion that “They want you to believe that we have a good government being let down by bad people. We don’t. We’ve got a bad government that is letting down the good people of this country.” Given the propensity of some Tories (most notably the Britannia Unchained group of MPs) to blame Britain’s declining economic fortunes on the indolence of its people, it’s an argument that could begin to resonate.
As the leader of a party which holds just 10 out of a possible 197 seats in the south outside of London, Miliband also repeats his declaration that one nation Labour is “a party of the private sector as well as the public sector, a party of south as well as north”. But don’t be surprised if you no longer hear the Labour leader refer to the “north-south divide”. As today’s Times (£) reports, a review of the party’s performance in the south of England by former cabinet minister John Denham, who now serves as Miliband’s PPS (and who recently blogged for The Staggers on Labour-Lib Dem relations), and Labour general secretary Iain McNicol has found that the phrase alienates southern voters.
Denham explains: “It used to be quite common to hear people talk about the north-south divide. If you think about that, the message is that everybody in the southern part is doing okay. If you use that language, it sounds as though you represent the northern bit.
A classic mistake for the party for a long time was using that sort of language — and then wondering why people in the south didn’t think we were talking about them.”
The phrase “one nation” appears no fewer than nine times in the five minute message. With an eye to the charge that his party’s policy agenda remains ill-defined, Miliband promises “concrete” announcements in 2013 on areas “from business to education to welfare”. If the Labour leader is to offer more than what David Miliband, writing in the New Statesman earlier this year, described as “defensive social democracy”, he will need to fulfil that pledge in full.
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