Let’s tell the truth about Farage: Vote UKIP, get the Tories

Explaining his decision to duck the Newark by-election, Nigel Farage told the BBC his target was “the general election and winning a decent amount of seats and, who knows, possibly the balance of power”. Surely he’s got to come clean and tell the public who he would put into power if his dream comes true and what policies he would demand in return.

It is inconceivable that he would support anyone apart from the Conservatives and it is clear that, as Ed Miliband wrote in this morning’s Mirror, he wants to drag them to even more extreme positions. And it wouldn’t just be on Europe.

On the NHS, his deputy leader Paul Nuttall said “the very existence of the NHS stifles competition” and his party wants to impose charges for visiting a GP.

They might pose as the people’s champions but they want bigger bonuses for the bankers who caused the crisis that’s cost so many jobs and made so many worse off.

They believe in “flat taxes” that would benefit Farage and the other privately-educated millionaires leading his party because they’d pay the same rate as someone earning just above the minimum wage.

On education, their only policy is to bring back grammar schools, but they have nothing to say about driving up standards for the vast majority of children or adults who have lost their jobs and need help with training.

How would those policies help ordinary families struggling to make ends meet?

Under the Tories, the average family is £1,600 worse off than four years ago, youth unemployment in places like Dudley remains far too high, we’re lagging behind our competitors when it comes to school standards and hospital waiting lists have increased.

We’ve shown how we’ll tackle the cost of living crisis with an energy bill price freeze, tax breaks for companies paying the Living Wage and a new 10p starting rate of tax to help make work pay. We’ll insist every young person out of work for more than a year takes a job, tackle zero hours contracts, help parents by expanding childcare and build at least 200,000 new homes a year.

Nigel Farage’s answer? Five more years of the Tories – just with even more extreme positions.

It’s about time the rest of the Labour Party followed the lead Ed set in the Mirror this morning, took the gloves off and started to tell the truth about Farage: Vote UKIP, get the Tories. We’ve got to counter that by winning public confidence on the economy, immigration, welfare and Europe – otherwise people won’t listen to us on anything else.

People are cheesed off with mainstream politicians – not just as a result of the crash and issues like immigration or Europe – but because the economy has changed so much and the jobs on which people depended in so many areas have disappeared. When people, jobs, businesses and whole industries can move right around the world, it’s been Britain’s poorest communities that have paid the highest price for globalisation. Many areas have not been able to attract new jobs and new industries to replace the ones they’ve lost.

People are uncertain and worried about the future. The problems are huge and complicated and when someone like Farage comes along with easy answers and a clear, plausible, and nostalgic message, it is very persuasive.

UKIP pretend they can cut Britain off and shield people from these huge global changes, but we’ve to be honest and explain that we can’t turn the clocks back and the pace of change will only get quicker. These are forces no party can prevent people being affected by. Instead of pretending we can shield people from these huge forces, we have to prove we have the ideas to help people master them.

Labour only wins when it has a positive, optimistic vision of the future. In 1945 we won with “Face the future”, we captured the optimistic forward-looking mood of the sixties with the “white heat of technology” and our 1997 message was “New Labour, New Britain”.

So let’s set some big ambitions. Let’s say we want Britain to be the country with the biggest increase in educational standards and skills in the world. More apprenticeships, better quality training, higher education available in every town. Let’s show how with new regional banks we can bring new jobs to the areas left behind.

Let’s answer Nigel Farage’s nostalgia by showing how we can help people prosper in this rapidly changing global economy by driving up skills, promoting economic growth right across the country and enabling the regions to attract new investment and new jobs in modern hi-tech manufacturing, IT and digital media, life sciences and low carbon industries.

We’ll meet this challenge by showing that it’s a choice between UKIP and the Tories, or Labour on people’s side in facing the cost of living crisis and equipping with them with the skills they need to prosper in the modern world.