In the budget on March 3rd Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, stole three of Mr Miliband’s ideas: gradually raising the corporation tax rate from 19% of profits to 25%, opening a national infrastructure bank in the provinces and encouraging corporate investment using tax incentives. This is not the first time Mr Sunak has followed Mr Miliband’s advice. He has already rewritten Treasury rules on the grounds that their narrow definition of costs and benefits favours investment in London.
There is nothing unusual about politicians lifting ideas from other parties. Benjamin Disraeli’s winning formula was to find where the liberals were bathing and steal their clothes. He defined the ideal government as “Tory men and Whig measures”. Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan repeated the trick by consolidating Labour’s welfare state; Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did the same with Margaret Thatcher’s free-market reforms.
Mr Corbyn likes to take credit for this by insisting that he won the battle of ideas even if he lost the general election. But almost without exception the ideas that have survived from that era were generated by Mr Miliband and his leadership team. Mr Miliband is a policy wonk who, in the wake of the financial crisis, came to the conclusion that Labour needed to be bold. He surrounded himself with other wonks, notably Stewart Wood and Torsten Bell .
Ed_Miliband Also in awarding billion of pounds contracts to donor friends in questionable ways
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