Ed Miliband and his merry band of socialists came out of 2013 regarding themselves as the winners, and they have done ever since his conference speech. They are sure that they’ve set the political agenda, covering up their lacklustre predictions about economic growth by focusing on the cost of living crisis; namely how inflation has been increasing at a faster rate than wages. Though as the Office for National Statistics has shown, that trend is about to reverse, and with it, any chance of a Labour victory in 2015.
The assumption made by many is that Ed Miliband is our Prime Minister in waiting, and the reality is that almost any other leader of the opposition would be. Austerity measures will always be sufficiently unpopular to make winning an election a stroll for the opposition. But Labour’s strategy was painfully wrong. First, they made the bold claim that the coalition’s cuts would result in one million fewer jobs. As David Cameron likes to pontificate at PMQs, this couldn’t have been more wrong: over one million new jobs have been created.
Then the magic of Ed Balls got to work. He predicted a triple dip recession, as a result of the government’s attempts to reduce the £120bn hole in the budget. Of course this proved not just to be wrong, but astonishingly wrong. Not only was there no triple dip recession, there wasn’t even a double dip one. This was high risk strategy from Labour and it backfired: they looked like fools. Facing humiliation, Ed Miliband cleverly redirected the focus of the national debate onto the cost of living. This would have been very effective a couple of months before the election, but it looks like being another case of Ed Miliband jumping the gun.
Here’s why: The ONS last week published figures comparing the relation between the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a measure of inflation, with average earnings. And, as they clearly show, in 2014 the cost of living crisis will start to alleviate. By 2015 everyone will have felt the benefits of the recovery. And who will that come back to bite at the general election? Poor old Ed, who thought the growth would only benefit the richest. As if that wasn’t bad enough for Labour, Miliband’s intellectual brother, Francois Hollande, is currently in the process of destroying the French economy.
It remains to be seen whether the effects on the French economy of the policies Ed Miliband wants implement here will have any effect on his poll ratings, but one thing is for sure as we go into 2014: Labour’s poll lead is half that it was this year. As Dan Hodges noted in The Telegraph, Labour’s lead today is 6%, based on YouGov daily averages. This time last year, it was 11.3%. And this is after a year that Ed Miliband considers to have been a success, a year when the cost of living crisis was still relevant. What will happen to Labour’s figures when wages rise faster than inflation? Decimation.
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