LABOUR Party leader Miliband hit out at the trade unions yesterday, accusing Unite leadder Len McCluskey of being ‘wrong’ to oppose a public sector pay freeze.
Interviewed on the BBC Andrew Marr show yesterday morning, Miliband said: ‘He is entitled to his view but he is wrong.
‘We’ve got the right policy to say we put jobs in the public sector ahead of pay rises.’
He added: ‘There is no future for this party as one sectional interest of society. We must be the party of the private sector just as much as the party of the public sector.’
Miliband said shadow chancellor Balls would be ‘iron’ in his resistance to ‘irresponsible’ spending. ‘There will be tough decisions that we’ll have to make as a government,’ he said.
A Miliband Labour government would be ‘different from the last and previous Labour government’ because ‘we are not going to have lots of money to spend’. There would be ‘tough settlements right across our public services’, he warned.
He continued: ‘We are not going to spend money that we don’t have, of course we’re not.
‘One of the things about Ed (Balls) is that he is going to be iron in saying you cannot make commitments, both he and I are absolutely clear about this, you cannot make commitments unless we have an absolutely clear idea where the money is coming from.’
Unite leader McCluskey responded: ‘Any pay restraint for low-paid workers is just plain wrong, it’s stupid. I mean, the Labour leadership is quite right in arguing that there should be a stimulus in the economy to start growth, all of us want a growing economy.
‘But you can’t get growth by restraining the pay of low paid workers, and it’s not just public sector workers.
‘Of course that message goes out and it means that private sector companies pick it up as well.’
He continued: ‘We’ve got to argue strongly that the way to make certain that there’s a proper stimulus in the economy is to give workers more pay not less pay.’
The major unions were meeting last night to composite a resolution for the Labour Party conference in Manchester this week opposing a public sector pay freeze.
• The European Court of Human Rights has given its initial approval to a submission claiming that UK laws unfairly restrict the power of unions to take industrial action.
The Strasbourg case is being brought by the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers union (RMT).
In its court submission, the union says that ‘the right to strike is excessively circumscribed’ in Britain, in breach of human rights laws.
Officials in Strasbourg have allowed the union’s application to go ahead, meaning the British government must now respond to the claim, and if its explanation does not satisfy the court, a full hearing will take place next year.
