Labour leader Ed Miliband has defended Labour's pledges on public spending, after a week when the party has tried to reposition its economic policy. Unions reacted with anger at Ed Balls' warning yesterday of a public sector pay freeze if Labour were elected in 2015, and Ed Miliband was quizzed this morning about whether current Labour policy would be in place at the time of the next general election.
"It's not odd at all," Ed Miliband told Andrew Marr on Sunday morning, amid claims he couldn't promise to reverse some of the government's planned welfare cuts, including taking Employment and Support Allowance from young severely disabled people.
"This is absolutely responsible opposition, and it's absolutely the right thing for us to be doing at this stage in the parliament," he insisted, after Andrew Marr quizzed him about Labour's pledge to cut VAT. Ed Miliband said that while he was calling for the government to cut VAT immediately, he couldn't say for sure whether that would be a Labour policy going into the next general election.
"I'll tell you at the next election," he said on the question of whether Labour would have a VAT cut in its next manifesto.
"We continue to believe that the government is pursuing the wrong strategy," he said. "£158bn more borrowing. That's what the chancellor announced in his autumn statement, it is self-defeating. The prospects for what we will inherit... look pretty grim quite frankly."
Arguing "we've got to find different routes to fairness," Ed Miliband didn't offer any new concrete policies, but reiterated his ideas to reduce tuition fees to a maximum of £6,000 and to force energy firms to guarantee pensioners got the minimum tariff on their fuel bills.
He did expand on his notion of "responsible capitalism", something he claimed David Cameron was now imitating Labour on. Milband said corporate takeover rules needed looking at, along with the "short termism" of fund managers, which he claimed had undue influence on how businesses were run.
"I'm not saying lets go back to 2007, I'm arguing for a very big reshaping of the way our economy works," he said.
"This is why my message is distinctive," he added.