Unions pile pressure on Ed Miliband
By politics.co.uk staff
Union leaders are taking advantage of their decisive role in securing Ed Miliband victory by piling pressure on the new Labour leader.
Ed Miliband was behind his rival and elder brother David Miliband on both support from parliamentarians and the party membership – but won the Labour leadership election with just 50.65% of the overall vote thanks to huge support from the unions.
Derek Simpson of Unite said he preferred Ed Balls’ robust approach to the deficit ahead of Alistair Darling’s policy of halving the deficit in four years in an interview on the Today programme.
“Our members supported him as individual voters,” he said.
“Word came back to us that people were seeing… a man standing up, empathising with problems, speaking from the heart and not just the brain, and word came back this is the guy our members were seeing – a leader.”
He called for an alternative strategy to be presented by Labour on economic and industrial issues, adding: “We’re fearful the impact of the coalition’s proposals really is falling very much on those least able to pay but more significantly than that, really risking plunging back into recession.”
Unite’s joint general secretary Tony Woodley called on the new Labour leader to reassess the opposition party’s commitment to halve the deficit within four years.
“I think we have to take a step back, look at the taxation side of things, but more importantly I don’t think we can just slash and burn and assassinate our public services,” Mr Woodley told the Financial Times newspaper.
“This guy has got to deliver and it can’t be more of the same… It can’t be a neoliberal approach, it can’t be that we are too wedded to big business, it can’t be that we are too close to the Americans when it’s not in our interest.”
