Ed Miliband wants to talk about the cost of living. Good. Because hardworking people would be worse off under Labour. It is one of those eternal truths in politics: Labour would spend and borrow more of your money.
Labour would spend and borrow more. For example: How many times did Ed Miliband mention the deficit in his conference speech? Once. Just once. He spoke for over an hour.
Britain’s top business group – the CBI – has said more borrowing would ‘spook the market’. If UK interest rates rose by even 1 per cent, mortgage bills would increase by £1,000 a year. So a Labour Government would hit Crawley with soaring mortgage rates.
Then there is utility bills. On Labour’s watch, when Ed Miliband was Energy Secretary, the average domestic gas bill doubled.
Labour’s pledge of a ‘freeze’ in bills is bogus too. You can already fix your bill to 2017, with Scottish Power, SSE and Npower: all deals that were in existence long before Miliband’s speech last week. But here is the point: these tariffs are more expensive than flexible deals – reinforcing the concern that price freezes lead to higher prices, as companies build in their uncertainty about gas price spikes. Take Npower for example, who proclaimed on its website last week: "No need to wait for Ed!" Actually, this is just a re-launch of an old product. Fixing to this product now, until the end of the Ed Miliband’s so-called price freeze, would cost you £636 more. The reality is this: Labour are promoting more expensive and inflexible tariffs. That is what Ed's freeze would mean. But the Conservative team are putting consumers on the cheapest tariff available.
Drive a car or a van? Congratulations! You are now the target for Labour’s stealth taxes, too. The two Eds - Miliband and Balls - were in the Labour Government that raised the rate of fuel duty 12 separate times in office and planned six further fuel duty rises after 2010. By contrast the Conservative team have frozen fuel duty and scrapped all of Labour’s rises. Driving a car is not a luxury. It is a basic necessity. The overwhelming majority of us drive to work (70 per cent) and beyond that, we all depend on bus travel, or road haulage.
Labour would also slash the basic State Pension by £234 a year, and go back to the bad old days of unlimited benefit handouts. Council tax doubled on a Band D home under Labour and they keep angrily opposing our council tax freeze - year in, year out. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to what their Shadow Local Government Minister, Chris Williamson, said recently. He said there is ‘a real problem with the council tax freeze…taking the grant would clearly create significant problems’.
Henry Smith MP