Labour: Tory cuts are extreme

Ed Miliband, leader of Britain’s opposition Labour party, yesterday sought to rally support for his economic policy, five months before an election, by portraying his rivals’ planned spending cuts as “extreme” and driven by a heartless ideology.

Although neck-and-neck in opinion polls with Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives, Labour’s economic competence rating is sharply lower, with rivals often telling voters the party mishandled the 2008 financial crisis and left behind the biggest peacetime deficit since the Second World War.

If Labour won power again, it would borrow and spend and rack up more debts, they say.

Miliband sought to change that narrative by seizing on disquiet and scepticism over the scale of spending cuts set out last week by Chancellor George Osborne.

Official forecasts showed state spending could fall to its lowest level since the 1930s under Osborne’s plans to eliminate the budget deficit by 2018/19 by cutting spending without raising taxes.

“They have finally been exposed... for who they really are: not compassionate Conservatives at all but extreme and ideological, committed to a dramatic shrinking of the state and public services,” Miliband said in a speech to business groups.

“Britain needs common sense spending reductions, not slash and burn,” he said, adding that public services would disintegrate under the Conservatives’ plans.

Miliband’s intervention comes as Cameron tries to refocus debate on the economy and away from immigration, with Britain facing up to five more years of fiscal consolidation to close a 5% budget deficit and start reducing a £1.4 trillion national debt.

Osborne’s proposals have come under pressure after a think-tank said the scale of his proposed cuts could radically alter Britain’s public service provision.

A ComRes poll for ITV News this week showed 33% of voters thought that cutting spending to 1930s levels was a good thing; 26% were against the idea. However, the poll also showed 52% backing a slower pace of cuts.

Miliband looked to gain from that divided opinion by casting his previously announced austerity plan as a fairer approach.

Matt Hancockm the business minister said Labour would continue to amass debt. “This risk to the economic recovery is exactly why Ed Miliband simply isn’t up to the job,” he said.