MANCHESTER, England (Reuters) – Former cabinet minister Ed Miliband pipped his brother to win the leadership of Britain’s opposition Labour Party yesterday thanks to union backing and could take the party down a more left-wing path.
The new leader’s focus will be on fighting deep public spending cuts planned by the ruling coalition which Labour says threaten public services and will hit the poor hardest.
The party has been searching for a new direction and a new leader since former prime minister Gordon Brown resigned following the party’s crushing defeat in a May election, which ended 13 years of Labour rule.
“Today a new generation has taken charge of Labour, a new generation that understands the call of change,” Miliband, 40, said as he basked in the applause of thousands of party activists meeting in Manchester, northwestern England.
Labour has recovered in the polls since the election and is now running neck-and-neck with the centre-right Conservatives who formed a coalition with the centre-left Liberal Democrats after the election.
The coalition plans deep cuts to rein in a record peacetime budget deficit it blames on Labour extravagance.
Miliband, a former energy secretary, won by a wafer-thin margin, edging out his older brother David Miliband, a former foreign secretary who was long seen as the favourite.
Miliband has so far backed Labour’s election pledge of halving the deficit in four years but there has been speculation he could call for deficit reductions to be spread over a longer period to avoid damaging public services and hurting the poor.
“I believe we must reduce the deficit but I believe we must do so much more than that to have an economy working in the interests of the hard-working people of this country,” Miliband said, adding that British society was “too unequal.“
