Ross Clark
overseas have been hit with what they deserve: a punitive tax on exported profits. It works: yesterday suppliers to Amazon were sent a letter asking that in future they bill the company’s offices in Britain rather than in Luxembourg.
Miliband’s business bashing goes way beyond what is necessary to tackle bad behaviour. It reveals a fundamental hostility towards free enterprise and markets. His belief is that markets do not work without the government intervening to control them.
He promised to freeze consumer energy bills without any regard to the fact that they are largely determined by whole- sale international markets over which neither Miliband nor anyone else has much control.
In any case some of the pain inflicted on energy consumers comes from green levies which he was responsible for imposing on energy firms during his time as climate change secretary.
What you very rarely hear from Miliband is any word of encouragement for businesses, any initiative which offers them help. One exception, to give credit where it is due, is his promise to cut business rates for 1.5 million firms and then freeze them. But we need more than just a one- year freeze on rates. We need to do away with
BY HIKING national insurance contributions, in the hope we would notice that less than rises in income tax, Gordon Brown imposed a much higher rate of tax on people who work for a living rather than live off their investments.
If Miliband had not been wrong- footed by the Conservatives’ promise at the last Prime Minister’s Questions to freeze VAT there is little doubt a Miliband government would have carried on the same process: picking businesses’ pockets through higher national insurance and thwarting job creation as a result.
As for the issue of an in- out referendum on the EU, yes, there are businessmen who are keen to remain in Europe. But there are also a significant number who want to get out of the EU because they can see the debilitating effect of EUimposed laws such as the working time directive.
Either way Ed Miliband is not going to impress many people simply by refusing the British people a referendum. On Monday the Institute of Directors added its voice to those calling for a referendum, recognising that it is in no one’s interests for Britain to remain part of the EU without public support.
The Labour Party leader’s tragedy is that while he is deeply suspicious of capitalists he isn’t much of a friend of the people either. His roots are in the dry world of academic Marxism where eggheads decide what is good for the workers, not the workers themselves.
Miliband may fancy he can see predators on the high street, in the City and on the industrial estates. But for most people the real predator would be a Labour government which taxed them to the hilt and regulated businesses to the point of destroying jobs.
‘ Tactics go down well
with trade unions’