DAVID CAMERON’S ABSURD CHOCOLATE ORANGE MOMENT

A NEW BATTLEGROUND IS BEING DEFINED.
By Ed Miliband

A week since I delivered my Conference speech. Watching and listening to the Tories this week, including David Cameron this morning, what is clear is that a new battleground is being defined.

It is around who can deliver a new bargain for our country built around values of responsibility and something for something. These are the values which the vast majority of the British people share.

On the one hand, we have David Cameron’s symbol of his new bargain: the chocolate orange.

I thought his “chocolate orange moment” was absurd five years ago and I have to say it was exposed on the radio this morning.

Yes he talked about it five years ago and yes, they are still being sold at the tills of WH Smith.

And that’s because the whole thing was a piece of absurd political positioning.

It was absurd not just simply because it was relatively trivial but because David Cameron failed to understand that politely asking commercial organisations to behave in the right and responsible way is not enough.

The question is whether you are willing to rewrite the rules of our society and whether you really believe they need to be rewritten.

So his symbol is the chocolate orange. I’m standing up to the banks that don’t do the right thing by small businesses, the energy companies that are too dominant in the market, the closed circles of opportunity that hold our country back, a short-termist culture in finance that has damaged our economy for decades, and huge inequality that comes in part from a take what you can culture.

The answer is not just to ask people to behave responsibly.

It is to rewrite the rules of the way our economy, our society and our welfare state works.

Do the rules of our economy encourage long-termism or short-termism, training of staff or not, unjustified rewards at the top or not, investment in research and development or not?

All the time in the rules it sets---such as on tax and procurement---governments make judgements about these issues, encouraging one type of behaviour compared to another.

We need a better set of rules in our economy to encourage businesses that invest, invent, train ,make and produce real products and services – rules that reward decisions made for the long term rather than the fast buck.
As I said in the speech “This isn't about one industry that's good and another that isn't. Or one firm always destined to be a predator and another to be a producer. It's about different ways of doing business, ways that the rules of our economy can favour or discourage.”

The old rules are not working for most people in this country nor for the British economy. Reform is essential.

Now let’s ask whether this is a government that is living true to rewriting the rules?

They talk tough on the banks but the very institutions which caused the financial crisis with grossly irresponsible behaviour are being told it is business as usual.

David Cameron and George Osborne are giving away hundreds of millions of pounds to the banks in corporation tax cuts – the wrong choice in a time of scarce resources.

They are showing no signs of taking on the other vested interests holding our economy back, just as they dragged their feet on phone-hacking.

And they are reinforcing the closed circles of opportunity: trebling tuition fees, abolishing EMAs, and so it goes on.

And on welfare, they are punishing couples who save, cutting childcare help from women who go out to work, and removing the requirement that young people have to take a job offer.

They are penalising something-for-something values, rewarding those who seek something-for-nothing and shrugging their shoulders at City bonuses or the excesses of boardroom pay.

On issue after issue David Cameron and George Osborne are showing they are out of touch and divorced from reality facing hard-working British families.
Every so often a political consensus needs to be challenged. This is one of those moments.

In the last seventy-two hours, the Tories have shown they are utterly confused about how to respond to the argument I have set out.

They can’t be the people who change the old rules. Why? Because they believe that the answer to the failures of 2007/8 and the financial crisis is more of the same.

They believe their own mythology: that the failure of that time was caused by government spending, not because of the wrong set of rules governing our economy.

So we have a Tory Party seeking to moving onto the ground I have set out. They will fail because they have not learnt the lessons of the past and no plans on how to build a future based on the values of the British people.