The political battlefield is in full swing as the major parties host their conferences. But what do their promises mean for business? David Torrance, the Grimsby Telegraph's parliamentary correspondent, reports from the Labour Party conference ...
LABOUR leader Ed Miliband is a keen student of US politics, although he's found unlikely inspiration for his next general election campaign: the former (Republican) president Ronald Reagan.
During the 1980 race for the White House he asked over and over again – "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?"
So in his keynote speech at the Labour Party conference in Brighton, the influence was clear when the Labour leader asked rhetorically: "At the general election in 2015, you should ask yourself: am I better off now than I was five years ago? You've made the sacrifices, but you've not got the rewards."
And it's a message – built around the "cost of living" theme – the Labour leader hopes will resonate particularly strongly in parts of the country like Grimsby and North East Lincolnshire.
And while recent signs of economic recovery might make that a harder message to sell, Labour MPs and strategists believe it will make it even more pertinent.
Small businesses are also in the party's sights, with Ed Miliband pledging to cut planned business rate rises for small firms if it wins power at the 2015 general election, something it will fund by suspending George Osborne's planned reduction in corporation tax, a clear sign a Labour government would prioritise local businesses over larger, international firms.
This commitment won strong support from Great Grimsby MP Austin Mitchell.
"The plight of businesses on the High Street is difficult because of increased competition," he said, "so we need to encourage small businesses and making sure they don't pay more in business rates is a good way of doing that."
Mr Mitchell was also pleased that Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls appeared to distance the Labour Party – ever so slightly – from supporting a high-speed railway line from London to northern England (HS2).
"The question is not just whether the HS2 line is a good idea or a bad idea," Mr Balls said earlier this week, "but whether it is the best way to spend £50 billion from the future."
The Shadow Chancellor went even further at a conference fringe event.
"To use an economics word, money is fungible," he said.
"What that means is every billion pounds we spend on HS2 is a billion pounds we won't spend on roads or cross-country train links or building new homes, schools or hospitals."
A better approach, added Mr Balls, would be to commit unequivocally only if the likely "costs are properly under control".
"I'm a Leeds-Wakefield MP," he said.
"You can see the economic benefits for northern cities, but I don't think that the case has been unambiguously made yet."
This was music to Mr Mitchell's rather skeptical ears, for he's long been on the record as an opponent of HS2 as well as cynical about its likely effect on the northern economy.
"It would be far better to modernise the East and West Coast Main Lines than build a very expensive HS2," he said.
"It's getting to the point where it would be cheaper to physically move Birmingham 20 minutes closer to London."
The veteran Labour MP was also critical of his leader's pledge to build 200,000 homes by 2020. "200,000 houses a year is too low an aspiration," he tweeted. "We need that number of public houses for rent alone. That's the key need."
Finally, Mr Mitchell dismissed as a "gimmick" Ed Balls' promise to submit Labour's spending plans to the independent Office of Budget Responsibility ahead of the next election.
"He's trying to be respectable," he said. Indeed, Mr Balls' speech was clearly a pitch for economic credibility; something the party badly needs given the Shadow Chancellor's close association with Gordon Brown's tenure as Treasury chief and therefore the economic crash of 2008.
Cleethorpes MP Martin Vickers called this an "attempt to overcome the obvious fears of the electorate that the next Labour government will be another tax-and-spend administration with little regard for what Gordon Brown used to call 'economic prudence'".
But Mr Vickers, a Conservative MP, also acknowledges that the "cost of living" will be a key electoral battleground in 2015.
He said: "What's important is that the Government makes sure lower and middle-income households get the first benefits from the economy as it enters recovery and growth."
In that respect Ed Miliband has now set out his stall, what Mr Mitchell describes as "a sufficient mixture of policies we can sell on the doorstep and an attempt to tackle the more fundamental problems of the economy".
The Labour Party has about 18 months to turn that mixture into an election-winning campaign.
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