Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, is in Crystal Palace today to show that, while the Conservatives are the party of big business, his party is backing small business.
Ed Miliband: visiting Crystal Palace
Accompanied by Streatham MP and his shadow business spokesman Chuka Umanna and Lambeth South MP Steve Reed OBE, Miliband will be highlighting Small Business Saturday.
Crystal Palace, through its local chamber of commerce and Transition Town, has established a thriving and successful street market, recently launched a Christmas-themed pop-up shop to promote local producers, and is today distributing thousands of copies of a booklet about businesses and shops in the area.
Miliband’s call for a fuel price freeze has dominated the national political agenda for two months, and today’s events will seek to position Labour on the side of new and growing business, where fuel costs has a significant impact on the bottom line.
A poll released by Ipsos Mori on Friday, based on interviews conducted after Thursday’s autumn statement by the ConDem chancellor Gideon Osborne, found that 42 per cent of respondents thought that the package of measures was bad for them; only 15 per cent said they thought it was good for them.
Ipsos Mori also found 40 per cent said they agreed with shadow chancellor Ed Balls’s claim that Osborne was in denial about the cost of living crisis, while only 24 per cent said they agreed with Osborne that his long-term plan for economic recovery was working.
That poll follows analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies that backs Labour’s claims that people will be worse off in 2015 than they were in 2010.
Labour’s plan to freeze energy bills has generally been presented as a measure to help householders, but Miliband will argue that it could also save the typical small business £5,000 a year.
- Transition Town publishes guide to local businesses
- Crystal Palace opens its little Christmas shop of wonders
- How to set-up a busy street market in less than 12 months
Coming to Croydon
- Strange Air book talk, Upper Norwood Joint Library: Dec 14
- Cinema Ruskin: Dec 21
- Steve Knightly at Stanley Halls: Feb 5
- Inside Croydon: Croydon’s only independent news source, based in the heart of the borough – 262,183 page views (Jan-Jun 2013)
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Whilst I am happy to agree that the Conservative Party is the Party of big business, I cannot agree that the Labour Party is the Party of small businesses. What small businesses what is less regulation and bureaucracy. However, during their period in office the Labour Government produced unprecedented increases in regulations and bureaucracy affecting small businesses.
Small businesses do not have the resource that large organisations have to cope with stringent regulations, nor can they keep the necessary specialist expertise in-house to deal with those regulations. So they have to go to consultants to provide those services and in so doing have to pay disproportionate high amounts for those services.
So there is no evidence that the Labour Party have shown any interest in helping small businesses.
Since when was Steve Reed the MP for Lambeth South?
On the broader point, this so-called initiative is as pointless as Mr Osborne’s Business Rate relief; it simply delays the inevitable; small shops are a thing of the past, the quicker we move on the better.
High street full of pawn brokers (Except prawn brokers in Addiscombe), betting shops , Tesco, Sainsburys and Morrisons and you call them small businesses.
Can some one remind Milliband that small traders were actually affected during the riots in August 2011? When is he he going to visit London Road Croydon?