Labour should have done more to create jobs, Miliband admits

With less than a week until the Barnsley Central byelection, Mr Miliband said Labour had tried to encourage new industries as traditional manufacturing firms shed thousands of jobs but admitted: “I don’t think we did enough”.

In an exclusive interview with the Yorkshire Post ahead of campaigning tomorrow with Labour candidate Dan Jarvis, a former Army Major, he also said Labour needs more MPs with a military background for the party to be in touch with forces families.

While Barnsley Central is not far from Mr Miliband’s own Doncaster North constituency, tomorrow will be his first visit of the short byelection campaign as Labour seeks to convince voters to go to the polls on Thursday to deliver a verdict on the Government so far.

Last May, Eric Illsley increased his majority to more than 11,000 and after his conviction for expenses fraud Labour’s main danger appears to be apathy.

Sources close to the Labour campaign claim they are finding some Tory voters switching sides because of dismay over the cuts and anger towards David Cameron, and Mr Miliband wants people to cast their ballot to “send a signal” to Number 10.

Barnsley is a town particularly vulnerable to spending cuts because even during the boom years between 1998 and 2008 – under Labour – the number of private sector jobs fell by 2,000. Instead, new jobs came in the public sector where thousands are now fearful about the future.

“I’ve said before we were too reliant on financial services as a country, and I think it’s true to say for areas like Barnsley that meant they lost out,” admitted Mr Miliband. “But let’s be clear about this. Areas like Barnsley – and I know from Doncaster – were basically suffering from the loss of traditional industries. I don’t think we did enough as a government to put in place new industries but we did make an effort to do it.”

While he is willing to admit mistakes, he rejects the notion put forward by the coalition that the growth of the public sector was necessarily detrimental to private industry. He points to the Building Schools for the Future scheme – Barnsley secured its cash before the rebuilding programme was scrapped – as an example of how Government spending created work for construction workers in the private sector.

“What the Government wants to say is you had more public sector jobs and that meant there weren’t going to be more private sector jobs. I don’t accept that idea. There’s always more you could have done and always more you should have done in relation to the private sector, but we did make efforts.”

Tomorrow he will be out in Barnsley with Mr Jarvis, a candidate who seems destined for a bright future at Westminster where if he wins he will be only the second Labour MP with a history in the armed forces after Falkirk’s Eric Joyce. In contrast, on the Tory benches there is significantly more military expertise.

It was an issue that came to hurt Labour while in Government, when, as the armed forces were put under intense strain fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, Ministers were accused of breaking the “military covenant” of care for service personnel and their families.

Mr Miliband said: “I think it’s very important for us as a political party – nobody owns the military and we’re not trying to make the military partisan – to understand the military and understand it, not simply by knowing the right policies and the right thing to do, but also having those connections, so I want to see more people like Dan Jarvis as candidates for Labour.

“I think when you look at what we did in government in relation to the military, no government does everything right but I think we did many of the right things. But I think those connections with the military are important for a political party because they give you a finger on the pulse of what the military are thinking, just like any walk of life.

“I don’t want to have a situation where it’s only the Tories who have people of that background. We have Eric Joyce who also has that background, but I want to see more people like Dan in Parliament for Labour.”

Mr Miliband admits Labour still has “further to go” to win back the trust of people despite his leadership having been given a new lease of life since the new year, but he claims the scale of cuts and the U-turn over the forests sell-off shows the Government is out of touch with mainstream opinion.

A Labour stronghold like Barnsley may not be the most illuminating test of opinion but if Mr Jarvis wins convincingly it will nevertheless be used as evidence of discontent with the Government.

“Every electoral test at the moment really is going to be a judgment about the cuts that are being made and whether the Conservative-led government are doing the right things or whether they are going too far and too fast,” said Mr Miliband.