Party leader promises to prioritise national living wage in next Labour government
Ed Miliband has blamed the last Labour administration for failing to properly address falling wages, promising to make it a priority for the next Labour government to introduce a national living wage.
Speaking in Edinburgh, the Labour leader returned to one of his major themes by accusing David Cameron of presiding over an "unprecedented living standards crisis" for the majority of families since he took power in 2010.
Energy costs had risen £300 a year, while real wages in Scotland had fallen in real terms by £1,400 since Cameron came to power, he said – the worst fall since 1870. In contrast, the UK's millionaires were becoming increasingly better off.
But he acknowledged that Labour had failed to restructure the economy when it was in office. Answering critics who said he needed to admit that the Labour government made mistakes, Miliband said its economic policies had been lop-sided and it had got it wrong. "We have to change our economy," he said. "We were going down the up escalator, putting money into tax credits but building a low-wage economy."
Labour should back demands for a national living wage that paid more than the minimum wage, he said. "It's a priority for us. It's important because frankly it's terrible that one of the richest countries in the world hasn't just a huge child poverty problem, but a growing child poverty problem, including for people who are in work."
Miliband brushed off weeks of public grumbling and criticism about his leadership from senior Labour figures – including Lord Prescott, the former deputy prime minister – as the normal experience of leaders. "You always get this, you always get advice and it's always nice to get advice as a leader. I have a clear focus, and I see how this argument [on living standards] over the next 18 months is going to play out, because we have got a government which is complacent."
He urged his audience, chiefly made up of Scottish Labour activists and senior party figures, to focus their energies on "the big squeeze on family finances", which would be the central issue of the next election. He said: "The biggest issue of all is the unprecedented living standards crisis that the people of Scotland and British people are experiencing.
"[It] hasn't happened since 1870, [the] fall in people's living standards and we've got a government saying actually things are going pretty well. We know who things are going well for at the moment: they're going well for people at the top."
The Labour leader asserted that Alex Salmond, the Scottish first minister and Scottish National party leader, was Cameron's hand-maiden, passing on many of the UK government's cuts and worsening others, while obsessing about independence.
"All the Tories offer is more of the same while Alex Salmond spends his time trying to divide our country rather than solving the problems families in Scotland face day in day out," he said.
His appearance in Edinburgh alongside Johann Lamont, the Scottish Labour leader, and Margaret Curran, the shadow Scottish secretary, comes after weeks of private and open griping within the party and wider labour movement about the party's performance.
That became clear when one Labour activist, Christine Richards, who is a former Tory group leader in Edinburgh city council, politely urged Miliband at the event to become "more specific and aggressive" in his attacks on Cameron's government.
Opinion polls show Miliband has failed to excite Scottish voters, and a former Labour first minister, Henry McLeish, said this week that Labour's failure to effectively attack the Tories could lead to Scottish voters backing independence rather than see a second Tory government in London.
The SNP has seized on these anxieties, accusing Lamont of a "summer of silence", failing to speak publicly about the national party crisis over alleged vote-fixing the Labour selection process in Falkirk, and failing to improve her party's position in the polls.
While Salmond is still struggling to build support for independence, the SNP still dominates the Scottish domestic scene. One recent poll suggested 48% of Scottish voters would support the SNP at a Holyrood election, nearly double the 25% who would vote Labour.
But Miliband asked his audience to imagine a revitalised Labour could become a party with 500,000 or 600,000 members rather than 200,000.