THE UNITED Kingdom’s economy must be changed completely to reward companies that invest for the long term, while penalising those who seek to make profits by predatory asset-stripping, British Labour leader Ed Miliband has declared.
In his first speech to a full-party conference, Mr Miliband said values had been allowed to be created that urged people to “take what you can get”, or to “be in it for yourself” and these had led to a deeply unequal society.
Fuelled by a celebrity culture and by excessive bankers’ pay, the UK had endured a “quiet crisis” in recent years, where too often those who did best were “not the right people with the right values, but the wrong people with the wrong values”.
“Inequality reinforces privilege and opportunity for the few,” Mr Miliband told delegates in Liverpool, adding that people who made a genuine contribution to society should be rewarded over those who did not.
Accepting that Labour had lost voters’ trust on the economy, Mr Miliband said the party would regain it by promising to “only spend what it can afford” and to deal with the UK’s current deficit if the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats failed to do so.
Describing some firms as “predators”, he pointed to the purchase of the Southern Cross carehomes company by a Middle Eastern private equity firm, which collapsed after assets were “stripped for a quick buck. They may not have sold their own grandmothers for a fast buck, but they certainly sold yours. They aren’t the values of British business. It must change.
“It must never happen again in the new economy we build.”
Labour’s mood was dampened somewhat by a ComRes poll, which put the Conservatives on 37 percentage points, compared with Labour on 36 – the first time the Conservatives have had a poll lead for nearly a year.
Singling out former Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin for particular blame, Mr Miliband said he earned three times the salary of former Rolls Royce chief executive Sir John Rose – a man who had made a genuine contribution to the economy.
Mr Miliband’s declarations were met with opposition from business leaders, with the Federation of Small Businesses saying he did not understand how jobs and apprenticeships were created in the real world.
John Cridland, the director general of the Confederation of British Industry, said the Labour leader must be careful “not to characterise some businesses as asset strippers” when business was needed to create wealth and jobs.
Though reaction to Mr Miliband’s speech was muted, union leader Len McCluskey said it was the speech of “a prime minister in the making”.
