ED MILIBAND’S pledge to “write the next chapter in the battle with low pay” is well timed after the Sunday Times Rich List has just exposed obscene increases in the wealth of the richest in an era of so-called austerity. Sadly this is about all we can say for it. 

This is not because the Labour leader is barking up the wrong tree. The TUC’s Britain Needs a Pay Rise campaign highlights the fact that low pay is a national scandal.

Mr Miliband is quite right to speak up for working people who cannot make ends meet — as shocking research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation revealed before Christmas, most of the 13 million people in poverty in Britain are now from working households for the first time.

Coalition government policy has done all it can to create a low-skill, low-wage economy in this country. 

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith’s crusade to “make work pay” in fact does the opposite. Despite the slogan, it has nothing to do with paying people in work more, but with dreaming up ever more humiliating measures to impose on people who have lost their jobs.

These notoriously include workfare, a massive public subsidy to employers, allowing them to exploit people’s labour for free. 

The hapless jobseeker is not paid a fair wage for their work and the company gets to avoid hiring someone it would have to pay properly. 

Devastating cuts to local government budgets
encourage local authorities to outsource key services to whichever privateer claims it can provide them cheapest.

The “efficiencies” the privateer then introduces to cut costs to the bone and boost profits almost invariably include wage cuts — as we have seen in Doncaster, where heroic care workers are fighting a massive pay cut of up to £7,000 a year, as well as lost holiday and sick pay, imposed by Care UK after it undercut the NHS to provide local caring services.

Combine this with the way the academies and free schools drives undermine collective bargaining among teachers, a crippling public-sector pay freeze forcing wages to fall further behind inflation and vicious attacks on trade unions across the board.

The result is, unsurprisingly, lower wages. Average incomes have fallen by 8 per cent since the 2008 financial crisis.

Meanwhile the 1,000 richest people in the country have seen their fortunes swell by 15.4 per cent in just one year, hoovering up an extra £69 billion since May 2013.

Mr Miliband was careful not to mention this gross injustice yesterday in case he is accused of being anti-business by the Tory media or Blairite goons lurking in his own ranks.

But a man who cribbed his “one nation” mantra from 19th-century Conservative prime minister Benjamin Disraeli should realise that these two stories — increasing impoverishment for the working majority and ballooning excess for the elite — are two sides of the same coin.

The “recovery” the government brags about is nothing more than the resolution of the economic crisis at working people’s expense.

The Tories may well throw a few pre-election scraps to the poor, but Labour’s promise yesterday should have gone much further. 

The idea of linking the minimum wage with median earnings is hardly radical — Business Secretary Vince Cable supports it — and Labour even refuses to clarify what form the link would take.

If Mr Miliband wants the millions of low-paid workers in this country to put their faith in him next year, he will have to do much better than this.