17th December 2009

A Credible, Balanced Plan To Secure Growth, Cut the Deficit and Protect Frontline Services

Issue

Key points

Alistair Darling has set out a grown up, credible, balanced plan to secure growth, cut the deficit fairly and protect frontline services. It will:
- Secure the economic recovery and go for growth - because faster growth will cut the costs of unemployment
- Rebuild the public finances in a fair way - we need to get the timing right, not choke off the recovery by cutting too early.
- Protect frontline public services - like schools, the NHS, police and Sure Start - while making services smarter, more efficient and more responsive.

All George Osborne has offered is incoherent, political posturing that would choke off the recovery and threaten ordinary families' incomes. His policies would:
- Deliver a decade of austerity and low growth - cutting support to the economy, leading to bigger welfare bills and a worse deficit in future years.
- Give unfunded and unfair tax cuts to the wealthiest - including his giveaway of £200,000 to each of the 3,000 wealthiest estates.
- Do lasting damage to our public services - opposing measures announced today to protect police, NHS, schools and Sure Start; and scrapping Labour's patient guarantees.

We are protecting frontline services like schools, NHS, police and Sure Start - a guarantee the Conservatives are yet to match. To achieve that, of course there will be belt-tightening in other departments. We will be relentless in finding savings - they will not be painless but they will not be reckless

The economic situation today is far too uncertain for us to set out - now - individual departments' budgets for the years up to 2014. And the current Spending Review has still got sixteen months to run, so departments have got their budgets set out until April 2011.

It is only the Conservative Party who are planning deep, wide and immediate cuts. It is they who need to explain where they would find the £26 billion they need to halve the deficit a year earlier. It is they who need to explain where they would find the £10 billion they would spend on tax cuts for the wealthy few. We would protect frontline services for the many; they would give tax cuts to the wealthy few.