By Lucy Phillips
10 January 2011
Labour leader Ed Miliband today indicated that local government, one of the areas worst hit by the coalition’s spending cuts, would not have been let off the hook by a Labour government.
Responding to a question from Public Finance on the extent to which council funding would have been scaled back under his governance, Miliband said: ‘We are not saying that we would have made no cuts to local government spending. But it’s the scale of cuts that this government is making, 27% I believe, that is having such an impact on councils.’
He refused to be drawn on numbers. ‘It’s very hard for us not being in government to do a shadow Comprehensive Spending Review and it would not be right for us to pick figures out of the air. It’s the scale of cuts this government is making and I think I’m right in saying they’re half as much again as ours would have been in terms of public spending.’
Miliband was speaking at a press conference in London this morning, where he spelt out four areas of government spending cuts that he agreed with.
He said his party supported cutting the public deficit through reducing public support for employer training, road building and legal aid. The Opposition also backed the coalition’s ‘welfare changes’ to the Employment Support Allowance.
Miliband’s comments follow his pledge, when elected Labour party leader in September, to be a ‘responsible’ opposition, not contesting every cut the coalition government made.
‘Labour has shown it is ready to make difficult cuts which we believe are necessary for the long-term health of our economy,’ he said today.
Meanwhile shadow chancellor Alan Johnson used the press conference to call on the government to repeat last year’s one-off tax on bankers’ bonuses, which raised £3.5bn for then chancellor Alistair Darling.
Johnson claimed the coalition was effectively giving bankers a ‘tax cut’ by replacing the tax with a levy that was estimated to raise only £1.25bn. This came at a time when families’ incomes were being squeezed because of a rise in VAT and other costs of living.
Throughout the briefing Miliband was forced to defend his choice of chancellor after a series of public gaffes and policy differences by Johnson. These included a TV interview yesterday when he appeared not to know the rate of National Insurance paid by employers – saying it stood at 20%, not the true figure of 12.8%.
In one exchange, the Labour leader retorted: ‘Alan clearly does know these things. The point about this is one of the big things that matters in politics are your instincts and the judgements you make about how to put things into practice. I would take his judgment over [Chancellor] George Osborne’s any day of the week.’
Miliband also claimed that the scale of the public deficit was down to the financial crisis not as a result of irresponsible spending by the Labour government. He said public borrowing under his party had been ‘within acceptable limits’ as a proportion of national income before the global economic crisis hit.
