Miliband plots to pinch Tory austerity slogan
ED Miliband is launching an audacious attempt to steal George Osborne’s austerity slogan ‘we’re all in this together’, claiming the Chancellor can never credibly use it again.
The Labour leader claimed last month’s Budget marked a turning point in public attitudes to the Government’s spending cuts.
Controversy over the decision to cut the 50p top rate of income tax to 45p, the ‘granny tax’ and spiralling executive pay had convinced voters the Coalition did not stand for fairness, he claimed. ‘They have pretty much given up on “we’re all in this together” themselves,’ the Labour leader said. Mr Miliband admitted Mr Osborne had been ‘ on to something’ when he coined the slogan before the last election – and that it had helped convince voters that austerity meant ‘shared sacrifice’.
But he added: ‘When you cut taxes for millionaires and raise taxes on Middle Britain, that’s not “we’re all in this together”.
‘We have got to show that we can be the people who deliver on that sense of shared sacrifice. It’s actually a really important Labour principle.’
Mr Miliband said his brother David is unlikely to return to the Shadow Cabinet, but their mother, Marion Kozak, has got over her deep distress at the family tensions that were caused by her sons fighting each other to succeed Gordon Brown as Labour leader.