He declared his support before a widely-circulated Financial Times report that Mr Balls had gone ahead without consulting the rest of the Shadow Cabinet, a point which David Cameron unsuccessfully tried to exploit in a Prime Minister’s Questions generally deemed to have gone some way to placating critics of Mr Miliband’s performance as leader.
Speaking at The Times CEO Ssummit on Tuesday, Mr Miliband, reprising a theme he started the previous week, said that in government his party would seek greater responsibility from the bosses of big companies about their pay and rewards. But while he wished to foster excellent relations with business “and celebrate wealth creation”, scrapping the 50p top rate of income tax for those on more than £150,000 would not be a priority for the party under his leadership. Instead, Labour would attach greater priority to seeking greater transparency about the difference between pay at the bottom and at the top of a company.
Mr Miliband, who earlier pulled out of sharing a platform with RMT boss Bob Crow at the Durham Miners’ Gala and whose front bench has been critical of next week’s June 30 strike, addressed an audience that included bosses of Barclays, British Airways, Centrica, Goldman Sachs, Santander, Vodafone and News International’s Rupert Murdoch. “I want to signal very clearly the importance I attach to Labour having a strong relationship with you. New Labour brought about a number of innovations for the Labour Party. One of them I intend to keep is that strong relationship with business.”
The Labour leader had earlier said in interviews, including with the BBC, that he believed Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had been too uncritical of boardroom excess in the City and corporate world, generally.Mr Miliband said credible free enterprise needed pay and performance to be linked. “The excesses we have seen at the top in parts of the financial services industry in the past do none of us any good. Just as it is right to say that those at the bottom of society should show responsibility, so it is right that those at the top show responsibility too. We have got to make sure that reward is in proportion to effort in what we do.”
But while removing or time limiting the 50p tax rate for the highest earners would not be a priority, Mr Miliband said there would be no return to the penal rates levied by Labour governments in the 1970s
