Labour's Better Plan for Rural Britain

Today Maria Eagle, Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, launched LABOUR'S BETTER PLAN FOR RURAL BRITAIN - a plan to build a rural economy that works for working people and supports rural families and communities.

"Rural Britain has been left behind under five years of the Tories and Lib Dems. A cost-of-living crisis, a low-pay, low-skill economy and a lack of power to make decisions about their future is holding back too many rural communities." 

Here are just five of the things Labour will do to stand up for rural communities:

1. We'll put right the damage done by the Tories’ decision to abolish the Agricultural Wages Board, replacing it with a new taskforce to tackle low pay and protect conditions for agricultural workers.
2. We will build more affordable rural homes by strengthening requirements on developers to build affordable housing in new developments.
3. We'll back small businesses that form the bedrock of the rural economy by cutting and then freezing business rates for smaller businesses which employ over two thirds of the rural workforce.
4. We will end the unfairness that many rural families face in an unregulated off-grid energy market.  We'll extend the remit of the new energy watchdog to off-grid households, protecting millions of rural families.
5. We will devolve new powers to our county regions, making sure our recovery extends beyond the City of London.

Download a full copy of LABOUR'S RURAL MANIFESTO by clicking here.

Labour Pledges

The real choices - the Labour alternative

As the Labour Party meets for its annual conference up in Manchester there are less than nine months to go before Britain is faced with a choice.

The choice to elect a government that only represents the interests of a few or a Labour government that will take on vested interests and stand up for the many.

The Tories and LibDems will use every tool at their disposal to try and discredit us and blame us for their failure.

Remember, under this useless Coalition the use of food banks has increased tenfold, prices continue to outstrip wages and it's getting harder and harder to get an appointment with your GP.

Ed Miliband's Labour Party offers a real alternative.

A Labour Government elected in 2015 will axe the cruel Bedroom Tax, strengthen the minimum wage, introduce a cap on energy bills to reset the broken market, and stop the Tory privatisation of our world-beating NHS,

The Scottish Referendum showed that people will come out and vote in huge numbers (86%) when given a clear choice about issues that matter to them.

Should be a record turnout in 2015 then.

Labour guarantees

 

Labour will act to deal with the Coalition's cost-of-living crisis.

 

With your support we will:

• Freeze gas and electricity bills until 2017 and reform the energy market to prevent customers being ripped off again in the future
• Expand free childcare to 25 hours for three- and four-year-olds of working parents
• Get 200,000 homes a year built by 2020
• Get the next generation into work with our compulsory jobs guarantee for young people who have been unemployed for a year or more

Read Glenis Willmott on Europe's role in beating the cost-of-living crisis by clicking here.

Ed Miliband on the cost of living crisis

When ministers claim the cost-of-living crisis is over, it serves only to demonstrate they understand neither the reality faced by millions of hard-working people nor the scale of the generational challenge.

Ed Miliband writing in The Independent today.  He continues:

Millions of families are caught in the crosshairs of a cost-of-living crisis: a few people at the top scoop more and more of the rewards; markets  such as energy have become uncompetitive, allowing huge prices to be imposed on consumers; and many of the new jobs being created require fewer skills, pay lower wages and offer less security. 

This Government cannot deal with these problems because lying beneath its claims of being converted to full employment is an economic ideology built on low pay, low skills, low prospects and  low productivity.

A Labour government will make the big changes needed in our economy to  tackle this cost-of-living crisis. 

Read the entire article here.

Labour's response to Osborne's Budget

Ed Balls says:

“George Osborne boasted once again today that everything was going well. Perhaps it is for the people he mixes with. But in the real world, people on middle and low incomes are still not feeling any recovery. And after today’s Budget, they still won’t be feeling it. Wages are down £1,600 a year since David Cameron came to office. And independent forecasts today showed people will be worse off at next year’s election than in 2010.

 

 

So it’s official: You’re worse off under the Tories. Yet there was no action in the Budget to deal with this cost-of-living crisis. No energy prices freeze to help pensioners and families struggling with soaring bills. No help for families with rising childcare costs this side of the election. And no action to get young people stuck on the dole into paid work. Despite all the hype, the Budget totally failed to deliver, except for the very richest who will still get a £3billion a year tax cut. And when Ed Miliband challenged David Cameron and the Chancellor in the Commons, they refused to rule out giving millionaires another tax cut.

Specifically...

 

Real wages are forecast to fall by 5.6% over the Parliament meaning people will be worse off in 2015 than when David Cameron came to power.

Three years of flat-lining and falling living standards has led to more borrowing than planned to pay for the costs of economic failure.

 Let's hope the measures in this Budget are better than the Government's Export Enterprise Finance Guarantee Scheme which helped just five firms before it folded.

 

It looks like the dear old threepenny bit.  Coincidentally, in real terms it will have about the same purchasing power.

The Budget failed to cap pension fees and charges which leave pensioners paying up to £230,000 over their lifetimes.



 

In summary...





The case for Labour's Banking Reforms

Ordinary British people are facing the worst cost of living crisis in a generation.  We here in relatively prosperous South Leicestershire are no exception.

Prices are soaring, wages are falling, working people are £1,600 per year worse off and small businesses are struggling to access the finance they need to grow. Yet David Cameron continues to demonstrate how out of touch he is with the struggles millions are facing and is determined to operate our economy as business as usual.

Members of Lutterworth and Broughton Astley Labour Party are delighted that Labour has made firm plans to help people struggling with the rising cost of living, such as Ed Miliband's pledge to freeze energy bills until 2017. But as important as this pledge is, it only helps to deal with the consequences of our current economic state, and not the symptoms.

The Tory-led Government has failed to make the long-term changes needed to build a new economy that works for everyone and not just a few at the top.

The Tories won’t build a new economy that can tackle the cost of living crisis. They are determined to cling on to the old economy in a global race to the bottom. They think low wages, low skills and insecure work is the way to take Britain forward in the hope that some of the wealth will trickle down from the top. 

If we’re serious about dealing with the cost of living crisis and winning the race to the top with countries like China and India, then we need to build a new economy that works for everyone, and that means dealing with one of Britain’s broken markets: our banking system that works for banks but not for businesses and families.

Britain’s banking system is dominated by just four banks that control 85 per cent of small business lending. This lack of competition is a root cause of poor service, a breakdown of trust and a massive drop of £56bn in lending to business since May 2010.

Part of the reason we rely too much on low paid, insecure work is that the small firms that could create the good, high paying jobs of the future can’t get the finance they need to grow both themselves and our economy.

Of course we need to keep supporting Magna Park and the international companies based there. But we mustn't forget that our local economy depends on small and medium-sized businesses. Even our villages have small business parks which are key to growing our future economy. For these enterprises to thrive, government must promote a wider range of banks that have to compete harder with each other for customers.



That’s why the next Labour Government will bring in a legal threshold to ensure no bank can get too big and that the market remains competitive for the long-term. We will improve the amount of lending to small businesses, improve the service to all customers and create new banks that will work for the communities they serve.

Under a Labour Government, small businesses will have a better chance of getting the support they need to grow, employ more people at decent wages and help Britain earn its way to better living standards for everyone.

Britain's rip-off energy prices

The Party has launched a series of comparisons like the above on its Facebook page.  If you're not already Labour's Facebook friend, shouldn't you be?  I have to say, I thought the divergence between cost and ability to pay would be more extreme.  Oh...  I see... I'm thinking of water.

Seriously though, a commitment to make these parasites invest some of their gargantuan profits in UK energy infrastructure would be a guaranteed election-winner.  I would also suggest that the independent parliamentary watchdog should make it impossible for ministers' blind trusts to invest in privatised utilities.  The purpose of blind trusts is to ensure disinterested decision-making - but any minister since the turn of the century must know that any trustee worth their salt would be failing in his or her duty if they didn't buy up these surefire money-spinners by the lorry-load.  No tax, no investment, low wages, profits up ten per cent year on year, every year - the investors' dream.