We’ll support hard workers but crack down on fat-cat bankers – Miliband

LABOUR leader Ed Miliband will today call for “a new bargain” between taxpayers and the government, with a crackdown on benefit cheats and “asset strippers” in business “who abuse the system”.

Mr Miliband, in a strongly worded keynote speech to the Labour conference, will hint at higher rates of tax for executives that “earn telephone-number salaries”, alongside a fairer deal for those that “make money and profit through hard work and hard graft”.

He will call for a shake-up in the way council housing is allocated, with local authorities being forced to take into account whether an applicant was looking for work and a heavy presumption in favour of those with jobs.

He will talk about a “quiet crisis” gripping the UK, with “society too often rewarding not the right people with the right values, but the wrong people with the wrong values”.

In an attack on bankers, MPs who fiddled their expenses, those involved in this summer’s English riots and the people behind the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, Mr Miliband will pledge increased support for “people who don’t make a fuss, who don’t hack phones, loot shops, fiddle their expenses, or earn telephone-number salaries at the banks”.

He will say: “If what you want is a welfare system that works for working people as well as all of us when we fall on hard times, I’m prepared to take the tough decisions to make that a reality.

“The hard truth is that, even after reforms of recent years, we still have a system where reward for work is not high enough, where benefits are too easy to come by for those who abuse the system and don’t work for those who do right thing.

“When we have a housing shortage, choices have to be made. Do we treat the person who contributes to their community the same as the person who doesn’t? My answer is no. Our first duty should be to help the person who shows responsibility.”

His speech comes after a ComRes opinion poll showed only one in four voters regarded Mr Miliband as a credible prime minister in waiting.