Tom Richmond: Osborne needs to show there is hope on jobs

His spending review was always going to be a vote-loser because of the record deficit that the Chancellor inherited from Labour. So it has proven as the ramifications of the spending cuts become clear – particularly at town halls in Yorkshire.

However, while Osborne's instincts certainly reflect the seriousness of the situation, he needs to do far more to sell his reforms to the public, despite this week's better-than-expected growth figures.

Why?

Up to one-third of people are employed by the public sector. Very little has been heard, in the past 10 days, from the majority of UK workers – the people whose livelihoods depend upon private enterprise.

Osborne needs to be far more astute, in my opinion, in explaining how scaling back the state will help re-balance the economy; David Cameron's platitudes to the CBI this week were hardly convincing, given that it took five months for 60m to be signed off to help with the evolution of offshore wind turbines that could underpin the Humber's manufacturing future.

Equally, Cameron and Osborne needs to be far more proactive in highlighting firms, and areas, where jobs are being created. Just as

News at Ten screened a jobs barometer every Friday night in the early 1980s highlighting the latest redundancies, the coalition need to demonstrate that there is hope on the horizon for all those who face a daily struggle to stay in work.

For they are not just having to face down the public sector unions, but also the BBC which is unhappy at having its licence fee frozen.

Take Thursday last week when I had the misfortune, for some reason, to watch breakfast TV less than 24 hours after the spending review.

It was a diet of misery as BBC presenters in every part of Britain pontificated from towns that would, effectively, be bankrupted by Osborne's cuts because of their public sector dependency. Private enterprise was hardly mentioned.

Until, that is, a presenter piped up from an industrial town in South Wales. She was expecting the caf owner she had collared to repeat the BBC mantra about those nasty Tories and Lib Dems in power. He did not. Asked for the reaction of his customers to Osborne's reforms, he said that he didn't know because people tended not to talk about economics at his premises.

The interviewer was dumbfounded – while I was in hysterics that the caf owner had been so honest. But what it showed, I believe, is that the country's economics cannot be dictated by the BBC's relentless negativity just because the Corporation has been wrong-footed and is now being expected to make efficiencies of its own.

LABOUR leader Ed Miliband and his team are not perturbed that some Shadow Cabinet Ministers are out of their depth. Actually, it suits them.

This will pave the way for Miliband to scrap the farcical Shadow Cabinet elections that see MPs foist a ministerial team on a leader. It is a device past its sell-by date – it does not apply when Labour is in government.

Two names to watch are Leeds West's Rachel Reeves and Barnsley's Michael Dugher. One Miliband insider believes that they will fight the next election as Shadow Chancellor and Shadow Defence Secretary respectively. Watch this space.

COULD Brian Moore, the rugby union player and equally pugnacious commentator, bring some order to the House of Commons? Don't bet against it.

On two occasions, Labour tried to persuade rugby's "pit bull" to fight

by-elections. The first was in Newark when Blair babe Fiona Jones fell foul of electoral law – Moore withdrew as candidate at the last minute.

He was even taken to meet Gordon Brown, the then Chancellor. "This is the closest I have been to a Scotsman for five years without having a fight," remarked Moore who said he was only interested in fighting his home-town seat of Halifax.

The second time came in 2004 when Ian McCartney, the Labour chairman, asked Moore to stand in Leicester South – a predominantly Muslim seat that went to the polls a day after the Butler report was published into the failed intelligence prior to the Iraq war.

None too politely, Moore declined. But he added in his

memoirs: "Considering that in all my time at Nottingham, Harlequins and Richmond I never made a single claim for expenses, I would have been a crap MP."

I'm not so sure.

IF Ed Miliband really wants to prove that his "Red Ed" sobriquet is misplaced, he should persuade his union friends to call off the firefighters' strike planned for Bonfire Night in London, and the traditional pre-Christmas walkout already being orchestrated by postmen to disrupt deliveries. The Doncaster MP should point out that such sabre-rattling does nothing to engender the public's goodwill – and actually undermines Labour's credibility.