Labour Party leader Ed Miliband speaks to delegates at the conclusion of the Scotland Report in the main hall of Manchester Central, in Manchester yesterday on the second day of the Labour Party conference.
Reuters/Manchester
Britain’s opposition Labour party yesterday promised to keep a firm grip on spending if it wins next year’s election, seeking to persuade voters with tough budget talk that the recovering economy will be safe in its hands.
It was an early broadside in a campaign shaken up by disputes over powers for the United Kingdom’s regions following Scotland’s No” to independence vote.
Labour is narrowly ahead of Prime Minister David Cameron’s right-leaning Conservatives in opinion polls but lags far behind in terms of who voters trust most to run the economy.
Ed Balls, Labour’s finance minister-in-waiting, said a Labour government would limit rises in child benefit payments, warning party members at the same time that it was a taste of more tough spending pledges to come.
“We have learned from our past and our mistakes,” Balls told Labour’s last party conference before the election in May. “We are tough enough to make the difficult decisions.”
The party has irked some business leaders by promising to raise Britain’s minimum wage to help ease what it dubs a cost-of-living crisis, but it knows it must do more to counter its image as a tax-and-spend party.
Promising measures designed to prove it is fiscally responsible is fraught with risk since doing so also means curbing spending on core social policies, something that could alienate traditional supporters.
The economy is expected to be the key battle ground for the 2015 election, but political disagreements over how to grant Scotland and the rest of Britain greater devolution have also risen to the fore after Scots rejected independence in part because they were offered new powers anyway.
The Conservatives are trying to cast themselves as the lone champions of the rights of the English, the majority nation in the United Kingdom, while Labour say they want to set up a constitutional convention after the next election to discuss UK-wide devolution.
Balls reiterated Labour’s pledge to get the current budget - which excludes spending on investment - into surplus during the 2015-20 parliament and to have the national debt falling as soon as possible by sticking to a fiscal plan that goes almost as far as that of the Conservatives. “We will not make promises we cannot meet and that we cannot afford,” he told hundreds of party members in Manchester.
The Conservative government likes to remind voters how Balls was part of the Labour government which was in charge when the 2008 financial crisis struck. Compounding the problem for Balls, Britain’s economy has staged a much stronger-than-expected recovery since mid-2013.
In an attempt to prove Labour’s credentials to keep on bringing down Britain’s still large budget deficit, Balls said he would cap rises in child welfare payments at 1% for the first two years of the next parliament. That pledge represented an extension of the current government’s plans and is likely to prove unpopular with Labour’s left wing.
