The Labour Party Financial Strategy

The Labour Party Financial Strategy as devised by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown

Ed Miliband Most Take Responsibility For Labour's Meddling

Ed Miliband must take responsibility at the Labour Party's meddling with Pensions and Banking Regulation. Most of the UK Banking crisis falls at Gordon Brown's feet.

Ed Miliband Will Not Gloat Over By-Election 14/1/11


But he remains in denial at his party's meddling with the Banking Regulation in the UK taking responsibility away from the Bank of England and introducing a light touch or no touch control systems. That system introduce by Gordon Brown Failed. Ed Miliband had been at the Treasury during the build-up to the credit crunch – and at a time when the Labour government gave Sir Fred Goodwin of RBS a knighthood.

Ed Miliband On Radio

Ed Miliband the Leader of the Labour Party got a right grilling from Radio 2 callers when he was on the Jermey Vine shoe.

The general concensus was very clear in that he was criticised for his unconventional personal life and for his ruthless destruction of his brother David Miliband who was to all intents and purposes the heir apparent to the leadership of thje Labour Party.


Here is what some of the listeners who phoned in said:-

"What chance do I stand as a person in this country if you're quite happy to tread all over your brother to get to the top"

"How can we trust anybody who didn't even put hisname down as the father of his first child on the birth certificate"

Why hasn't he got married? Why hasn't he committed his life to his partner?

One Labour Party supporter accused him of not showing the required passion and he was then forced to admit that he had been "on a journey" since landing the job some 3 months ago.

He has already been under somewhat of an attack after writing an articlein the Times Newspaper stating that teh previous Labour Government of which he was a member were not to blame for leaving Britain woith such a substantial budget deficit.

A radio 2 listener Sian Williams soon rang in to complain abou this attitude. She said " I get really frustated when I see you on TV night after night with your grawling voice slagging off our present government who are doing their utmost to keep this country on its feet.Cuts have to be made. Most of the mess we're in now was called by your so called ten year government."

When pushed about the leadership struggle with his brother he said that the competition had been friendly and that he would welcome David back to Labour's front bench.

Ed Miliband A Tax Expert ?

What can we say about Ed Miliband the new Labour leader and his view that the VAT increase from 17.5% to 20% is the wrong tax at the wrong time?

Could it be that Miliband is in fact the wrong leader at the wrong moment in history?

Before we consider that question we need to ask the key question what experience does Ed Milliband have to be able to make such a critical statement.?

What better policy or policies does he have to offer. What can he really bring to the country.?

Mr Milliband is critical of the coalition for "going to far and to fast" in reducing public spending and increasing indirect taxes. Yet his very own Labour Chancellor Allistair Darling had not ruled out the possibilty of changes to the rate of VAT when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister.

I believe that Mr Ed Milliband has to accept some basic home truths before he can criticise the coalition.

Firstly he needs to appreciate that it was his own Government who have brought such an economic disaster to Great Britain. I am sure we can all remember those amazing words of the last Labour Prime Minister when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer when he used to say on each budget day "no more boom or bust" and then he allowed such a boom and such a bust that has not been seen in the UK since the Great depression.

The previous Prime Minister Gordon Brown has to be remembered for many poor decisions and one of which was to sell 400 Metric Tons of the British Gold reserves at the lowest price for more than 20 years. The sale was inept to say the least. It was announced to the markets their intention to make the sale and in so doing undoubtedly substantially reduced the price that could have been obtained in the future as the intended impending sale over hung the market.

It would undoubtedly have been much better from a marketing angle to sell into a rising market.

The price obtained was less than US$ 300 an oz currently the price of gold in January 2011 is over US$ 1,400 a gain of some 400% or to the British Treasury a very substantial loss. Who was one of the key advisers to Gordon Brown during this time and sent various memos to the Bank of England asking for their support and blessing (which was not forthcoming) it was of course the new leader of the Labour Party.

The previous Labour Government have brought Great Britain to a severe economic deficit substantially of their own making or failure in financial supervision it is the same as it was on there watch that it all went wrong.

So Miliband has no claims to being an economic guru nor does he offer any policies but has the nerve to debate about the coalition policies.

We know that his judgement is a touch less than cautious as the last MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth Phil Woolas was appointed a shadow minister by Ed Milliband but then he lost the seat for smearing his Liberal Democrat opponent Elwyn Watkins during the general election.

Ed Miliband VAT

The Labour Party Ed Miliband started  the new year 2011  by complaining about the VAT increase from 17.5% to 20%.

That must raise many questions for Ed Miliband who is known for his economic prowess in helping Gordon Brown sell 400 Metric Tonnes of the UK Gold reserves at less than 300 US $ an oz compared to the market price today which is in excess of US 1,400 US $ an oz.

He makes me laugh as he and his party have  no properly thought out plan or ideas to be able to reduce the appalling  deficit that his own party and the financial genius who saved the world with no more Boom or Bust Gordon Brown left behind.

He and his party have no  alternative plan  to reduce spending or perhaps increase personal taxation.

If  the Liberal Democrat – Conservative Coalition runs its full length then with at least four clear years from a general  election there is some time for the Labour Party to construct some economic policies.

Gromit

Ed Miliband V Cameron

Ed Miliband v Cameron

Gordon Brown Disaster

Well, perhaps not that many. Yet, in one sense, Brown's memoir could prove to be the most topical and significant: an attempt to settle the biggest score of the lot. In seeking to explain the global crash, to justify his own response to it, and to plot a way forward, the ex-PM strikes at the heart of the matter for the party he used to lead: namely, Labour's catastrophic loss of economic credibility. "We are witnessing the biggest shift in economic activity in our history," he said in Saturday's Guardian. "But it is very difficult to explain to people By the time of the election it was very difficult to tell that story."
In a Daily Telegraph interview on the same day, Alan Johnson, the shadow Chancellor, was refreshingly candid about the scale of the problem. "We lost [economic credibility]. We've lost it to such an extent that when we do polling, the 13 years of what we did - low interest rates, inflation under control, the highest level of employment in our history, paying down debt - all that's been turned into 13 years of overspending and debt. On economic credibility, we are in a really worrying position."
It is important to be clear about what economic credibility is, and what it isn't. It is not to be found in the approbation of economists (though that may help), in the fact that a party's figures add up (though that's essential), or in some abstract statistical calculus (voters aren't interested). Economic credibility is more numinous, more visceral, extremely hard to achieve and terrifyingly easy to lose. It depends on the electorate's general sense that a party is both competent and - crucially - able to restrain its worst tribal instincts when managing the nation's finances.
The Tories have always to fight off the impression (which has still not been entirely eradicated) that they will feather the nests of the rich, neglect public services and make unaffordable tax cuts. This is why David Cameron and George Osborne made "economic stability before tax cuts" their mantra from the very start. Labour, in contrast, generally faces the charge of profligacy, an addiction to "tax and spend" and an indifference to public debt. Nobody knows that better than Gordon who, as shadow Chancellor in the Nineties, had to address and minimise such perceptions. As the Independent's Steve Richards puts it in his excellent new book on Brown, Whatever It Takes: "For Labour politicians, clear and attractive definition had tended to come from intoxicating images of better-funded public services and promises of redistribution from rich to poor. Brown resolved to project competence alone."
When, as Prime Minister, he ceased to do so, the game was up. The global crash might, indeed, have been his great chance to present himself as the indispensable national leader in time of crisis; that, as he put it in his 2008 conference speech, this was "no time for a novice". Instead, Labour came to resemble nothing better than a fractious, exhausted oligarchy unable to settle upon a clear strategy to deal with the deficit. Even as he triumphed at the London G20 Summit in April 2009, Brown seemed light years away from the money worries of ordinary voters. As Douglas Alexander, the shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, put it in a thoughtful speech to Demos last Tuesday, "the repeated refusal by some" - Brown, principally - "to use the word 'cuts' for many months after the global financial crisis gravely damaged voters' confidence that we got it".
Labour now confronts a two-party coalition that has defined itself by means of a shared economic narrative and a brutally clear programme of deficit reduction. As the protests and opinion polls show, this strategy presents natural opportunities to a steely, disciplined Opposition. Yet it also sets an elephant trap for Labour, into which Ed Miliband seems determined to march.
Quite unnecessarily, he has declared that the 50p income tax rate should stay, not as an emergency measure, but a social good in itself - a traditional soft Left posture that has already set him publicly at odds with his shadow Chancellor. To use phrases such as "cultural vandalism" in the context of the university finance debate, as he did in yesterday's Observer, may earn him some cheers on the barricades. But they also make him seem daft: the Coalition's proposals for higher education funding are a watered-down version of the report by Lord Browne, commissioned by the Labour Government of which Miliband was a senior member.
In the seven months since the election, he has managed to descend from Cabinet minister to adenoidal rabble-rouser. The public will not trust such a politician with a whelk stall, let alone the nation's finances. Economic credibility is bound up with political adulthood. Whatever else Brown's new book has to teach his successor as party leader, it should at the very least act as a stern reminder that this is no time for an adolescent.