There is no PMQs today, so Ed Miliband is filling the time as gainfully as he can with a speech bashing the Tories. Unsurprisingly, he’s making rather a lot of last week’s Budget — particularly the 50p tax cut and the frozen personal allowance for pensioners — as well as of Peter Cruddas’s recent indiscretions. And so David Cameron will be described as ‘out of touch’ and all that.
But there is something else with today’s speech: a prop, in the form of a five-point ‘pledge card’. I don’t think we’ve had one of these from Labour for a couple of years now, although they do tend to reserve them for general election campaigns. Miliband’s will focus on helping, in his own words, ‘squeezed middle families in these tough times’. You can read all five of its prescriptions on the Labour press team’s Twitter feed, but they include, ‘Stop the Government’s raid on pensioners and block its £40,000 tax cut to 14,000 millionaires’ and ‘Stop excessive fees charged by banks and low cost airlines’.
One thing stands out from the pledges, apart from their oppositional tone (most of them are about ‘stopping’ or ‘ending’ or ‘forcing’). And that is Miliband’s continuing reliance on what I’ve previously called the ‘The new politics of leaning on business’. Three of his pledges are about exerting pressure on companies to lower their prices or the fees they charge. And while it is doubtful what this can actually achieve, it will attract the Labour leader for two reasons: first, because it helps him pose as a consumer champion, and, second, because it’s cheap. Giving businesses a piece of your Milimind doesn’t cost much — if anything — for the public finances. Indeed, he will emphasise the ‘affordability’ of these measures today.
But, judging by the passages that have been released so far, Miliband won’t concede much else to the fiscal situation. It’s all about attacking the government’s cuts to working tax credits or the frozen personal allowance for pensioners. Labour will say that they can fund all their plans with various tax hikes for the wealthy, but the maths are questionable and the tone is unmistakeable. Coupled with Ed Balls’s recent remarks, there are signs that Labour are veering back towards their traditional anti-cuts stance. January seems so long ago now.
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