SHADOW Labour Chancellor Ed Balls said yesterday that the Tories are not even half way through their cuts, and that if elected they would make a further £70bn worth of ‘deeply destructive’ cuts.
‘This,’ Balls said, ‘would all but end funding for local government’ and drive Britain back to spending levels not seen since the hungry 30’s.
Balls said that this would mean social care would be cut on such a scale that a third of those who are currently receiving elderly care would not be able to continue to do so, and that the cuts would mean introducing charging for the NHS.
Balls added: ‘These are funding cuts that the Institute for Fiscal Studies said, the day after the Autumn statement, were colossal and would require a fundamental re-imagining of the role of the state.’
He said: ‘The Tories would in the next five years, need to make spending cuts which add up to a staggering £70 billion.
‘The analysis we have published shows Tory plans mean: spending cuts in the next four years which are larger than in the last five years, we are not even half way through the cuts the Tory are planning.
‘Spending cuts which are larger than at any time in our post war history. More extreme than in this parliament, more extreme than in post war Britain and more extreme internationally, too.
‘Today we are also publishing an analysis of what these unprecedented spending cuts would mean in departments that the Conservatives have said that they have not ringfenced.
‘Some key departments would actually be eradicated entirely, they would cease to exist. A total of three departments would cease to exist in so far as their day to day spending is concerned.
‘The Foreign and Common Wealth Office would go, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department of Transport would have no day to day budgets left at all.
‘Cuts on that scale would mean closing all our embassies, closing all our job centres, closing our Back to Work programme, all but ending central government funding for local government.’
However, he admitted that if elected the Labour Party would also carry out cuts to ‘balance the books’. He outlined ‘Labour’s tough but balanced plan on the public finances’.
Balls said: ‘We will cut the national deficit year on year, we will get the current budget into surplus and we will get the national debt falling as soon as possible.’ He claimed: ‘We will balance the books in a fairer way.’
He said that one of the ways Labour would do this is through cutting the winter fuel allowance for ‘well off pensioners’ and capping child benefit.
He added: ‘We will introduce a compulsory jobs guarantee, to provide a starter job for every young person who has been unemployed for over a year. They will have to take that job or lose their benefits.’
The Tories have printed a highly provocative poster showing the Labour Party in the pocket of the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP).
During questions, Balls was asked: ‘In order to put Ed Miliband in to number ten are you willing to do a deal with the SNP?’
Balls answered: ‘We have had in the last 48 hours a kind of scare from the Conservatives, of the SNP in coalition. Why are they doing that? Because David Cameron does not want to debate why he won’t do the debate and he doesn’t want to debate the £70 billion spending cuts.
‘It is a complete nonsense argument, we want a majority and that is what we are fighting for.’
