Ed must not chase the shadow of Farage

Fed up with the General Election already? Who can blame you? And there are still 16 bruising weeks to go.

 
Please don’t tune out though – there’s far too much at stake.

 
Cameron’s ‘road to recovery’ is full of potholes and the wheels are off his wagon. Only one in 40 of the new jobs his government hails are proper jobs and more than 700,000 businesses it claims have bloomed in Tory Britain have NO employees.

 
Not one.

 
He’s borrowed more than he promised the people because Osbornomics are about as much use to our nation as a dinner service of chocolate teapots.

 
Yet the Tories have the cheek to run on their economic record.

 
As for Nigel Farage, he’s sworn off the demon drink for January – but wouldn’t it be better for the common good if he could swear off the political poison too?

 
Whenever Mr Farage appears, a shadow descends on public life. To borrow from the famous phrase, he could light up our politics by leaving the screen.

 
This is what Ed Miliband must remember. Blow away the fear and what do UKIP offer? Not jobs, not homes, not decent wages – just more fear.

 
So when Ed says that he’ll jail bad bosses who use migrant workers to drive down wages, he is offering us something new. Someone on our side. Hope. Such policies have to be just the start.

 
In what is set to become the nastiest election of recent times, Ed must stay true to himself as a decent man. One who genuinely wants to make our country fairer again.

 
So let’s see more of the policies that will build the homes we need, give our kids a future and get the wealth of our country out of bank vaults and into the pockets of those who have earned it.

 
As long as Labour sticks to its values, then its plan for the nation will be the right one. Ed can win if he offers hope – and doesn’t chase the shadow of Farage and fear.

 
Your vote matters

 
Quietly, last September, how we register to vote was changed. As a result, the young, the unemployed, one million women, too – the very people least likely to vote Tory, coincidentally – are falling off the voter roll.

 
That’s why I back the Mirror’s NoVoteNoVoice campaign to get the missing millions registered, and voting.

 
Your vote matters. Don’t just take my word for it. Former US president Lyndon B Johnson once said, “The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice.”

 
Or, as he also more bluntly put it, “a man without a vote is a man without protection”.

 
Keep the road to rights open

Danny’s a bus driver. He works six days a week to earn what he did five years ago.

There are 80 different rates of pay for London’s bus drivers. Some earn £3 less an hour than drivers on other bus route doing exactly the same job.

As Danny says, we wouldn’t expect a police officer in one part of a town to earn £300 less a month than one in another. Why should it be different for bus drivers?

Rather than doing the right thing and helping with talks, the government’s solution is to stop decent men like Danny from ever again acting to improve their working lives.

Cameron and Co want the UK to join a dodgy elite, the handful of repressive regimes where the right to strike has been all but outlawed.

This is bullying, not government. Boris Johnson, for all his clownish joviality, is leading the way, hammering workers who seek nothing more than a fair day’s pay.

Bosses should be wary too. By allowing nasty ministers to play political games with workers’ rights, they’re letting them drive roughshod over the precious freedoms of each and every one of us.

Leave NHS to our professionals

Hinchingbrooke hospital carries on today. Patients will be tended to, relatives reassured. That’s because that is what our NHS professionals do – they care, they put people before profits.

We’re told that it is too simple to say `private bad, public good’. But when Circle said `We can’t make money out of the sick, we’re off’, it was a reminder that big business has no business with our health care.

 
But the fight is not over. A Godzilla agreement before EU legislators now – the TTIP – means we will never be able to rid our services of profit-first companies like Circle. This government backs the TTIP, just as it backs selling off our NHS.

Hinchingbrooke’s flagship privatisation was a spectacular failure. As Circle slinks off leaving the public with the bill for their mess, let’s remember the words of veteran campaigner Harry Leslie Smith.

To Cameron, to Circle, to all those looking to suck money out of our services, “get your filthy mitts off our NHS.”

‘Invisible man’ Cam’s on the run

So David Cameron has turned tail on debating with the brilliant Bite the Ballot’s young voters, the only party leader to do so.

Do you think the PM who once wanted to `hug a hoodie’ but has left our kids worse off than their parents is running scared?

He’s wobbling too about the national televised election debates.

The PM’s advisors are said to have told him that letting the voters have a look at him in 2010 cost him the election.

By dodging the debates altogether, he plans to slide into No10 on a tide of smears and crony cash.

Surely if he wants to be PM of this country, he should have the courage – and courtesy – to face the people?

Time to tax the fat cat landlords

Are you braced for Blue Monday, the day when there is too much month at the end of the money?

Shelter has warned that millions of hard up people will not meet their rent or mortgage payments this month.

Fear not though as there are some among us for whom this crazy economy is coming up roses.

Private landlords have amassed themselves a fortune in the past five years, the Financial Times reveals. ÂŁ177bn profits to be exact, pretty much by doing very little.

Britain’s busted housing market means those lucky private landlords can sit back while their properties balloon to an out of this world value of £1TRILLION.

A paradise indeed for private landlords but a hell for the millions in housing need.

 
Here’s an idea then. How about a 10 per cent tax on the private landlords’ windfall?

It could solve our housing crisis at a stroke. Councils could build more homes, in big numbers, driving down the punishingly high rents in this country. At last, we could begin to free folk from the misery brought about by the housing fat cats.

• This article first appeared in the Daily Mirror, January 14