Ed Miliband's speech which will target the monopoly of the major banks

We face a choice about how we want to fight the next General Election: optimistic about Britain and its future, or pessimistic.

Giving people a sense of hope, or trying to win by fear.

In the next 16 months, I want you to tell people about our belief that Britain can do better than this and how we can tip the balance away from struggle and towards hope. Because the next election is about who we are and who we want to recover to be.

For too long, politicians acted as if, when something wasn’t talked about in politics or wasn’t big on our ­television screens, somehow it wasn’t happening – the problems in the eurozone or ups and downs on the stock market.

They are the daily stuff of politics. But all the while something just as important, something even deeper, has been going on. That is the cost-of-living crisis – and it is the single greatest challenge our country faces. People need to know that we’re going to do something about it.

The Tories have nothing really to say about your living standards or the prospects for your family as they think low wages, insecure work and a hope of wealth trickling down from the top is the way Britain succeeds.

At our party conference in September, I talked about how we will reform Britain’s broken energy market. Today, I will be delivering another speech about another broken market: Britain’s banking system.

Financial services are important. But, for an industry calling itself a service, it has been a poor servant of ordinary families and firms. That is because too much power has been concentrated in too few hands.

The next Labour government will instruct the Competition and Markets Authority to report to us within six months on how to create two powerful banks to challenge the big banks.

This is not about if we should have new banks – the question this Government is still asking – but how. It is about new banks with a substantial proportion that can compete properly.

And we are not asking whether existing banks might have to divest themselves of branches. We are asking how we can make that happen.

We can make the long-term changes Britain needs only if we take on powerful vested interests, from energy to banking, and reform broken markets. And tackle the cost of living crisis with a Labour Government that fights for you.



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