ED MILIBAND will do his election prospects no harm by standing up to tax-dodging businessmen and what Unite general secretary Len McCluskey calls “Blairite retreads.”

Boots billionaire boss Stefano Pessano lives in the Monaco tax haven and shifted the company’s headquarters from Nottingham to Zug in Switzerland to minimise corporation tax.

The sheer cheek of this man in thinking, despite paying no tax in Britain, that his views on who should be elected prime minister merit a hearing beggars belief.

Labour’s problem in recent decades has been that the party has paid more heed to such people than it does to working people and their organisations.
Unite has just shelled out a further £1.5 million to Labour, making a total of £2.5m so far in this campaign, which McCluskey explains as “doing our duty to democracy.”

He is right to contrast the “clean, transparent to the public, democratically sanctioned and honestly accounted-for” contributions made by trade unions from their members’ contributions with the millions received by the Tories from “hedge funds and from shadowy dinner clubs of big businessmen.”

But it must stick in his craw, as in most trade unionists’, that Labour leaders, including Miliband, have sought desperately to distance themselves from the trade union movement.

The totally unnecessary kerfuffle over the Falkirk candidate selection procedure displayed a visceral antipathy to trade union delegates’ involvement in this aspect of Labour Party democracy.

Distancing the party leadership and decision-making from trade unions has political consequences, seen most clearly in the alienation of erstwhile solid Labour constituencies in Scotland from the party.

Trade union leaders can be patient to a fault when it comes to the party that their forebears created, but growing numbers of working-class people do not share that patience.

They have witnessed new Labour cosying up to the City which saw alternative sources of finance open up briefly for Labour as party leaders simpered how “intensely relaxed” they were about a tiny minority becoming filthy rich as long as they paid taxes.

Former ministers cashed in on their time in office by accepting jobs with big business, including companies that undermine the public nature of our NHS.

No wonder such people as Alan Milburn and John Hutton grab openings in the capitalist press to snipe at Miliband and demand that he backs the conservative coalition “modernisation” agenda of handing over the NHS to the private sector.

It was, after all, their hero Tony Blair who introduced the internal market into the NHS, taking his lead from the private sector rather than health unions, professionals or patients.

Miliband draws flak from a concerted chorus whenever he suggests doing something, no matter how moderate, about corporate tax avoidance, energy company profiteering or soaring house-price inflation.

Assorted self-professed Labour supporters as John Mills, Griff Rhys-Jones, Melvyn Bragg, Bill Oddie and a gaggle of London MPs have spoken out self-interestedly against a mansion tax payable on properties valued at over £2m.

Who do they think should carry the burden of taxation if not those whose wealth has multiplied through no effort of their own?

Labour will be vilified by the capitalist media, the Tories and the Blairite retreads whenever it veers, however slightly, from the path of neoliberal orthodoxy.

Miliband’s best hope of election is to establish clear political lines between Labour and the Tories and put the working class before City profiteers.