LEADING BRITISH Labour Party figures, who are facing defeat in next year’s general election, have rounded on the Conservative Party, accusing the Tories of being intent on cutting public service budgets by 10 per cent across the board.
Peter Mandelson, speaking in London yesterday in advance of this week’s Trades’ Union Congress, said the Conservatives are “foaming at the mouth” at the prospect of making public service cutbacks.
“Britain’s welfare state and public services survived the Thatcher/Major era – but only just,” said Mr Mandelson, the man most likely to direct Labour’s election campaign.
Rejecting the charge, the Conservatives’ shadow treasury minister, Philip Hammond, said: “This is not an agenda of indiscriminate slash and burn. It’s an agenda of precise surgical intervention to try to improve the way public services are delivered.”
Public spending has come to dominate the political debate in the UK in recent weeks, following a period when Britain’s involvement in Afghanistan was the main debate.
Under Labour’s current plans, public spending would rise from £630 billion this year to £690 billion by 2011, but those forecasts are unlikely to be met by chancellor of the exchequer Alistair Darling.
On Sunday, opinion polls backed the Conservatives’ preference for spending cuts, rather than tax cuts, and – most damagingly for Labour – showed that a majority trusted the Tories more to run public services.
However, Labour, which has lagged behind for more than two years, is now trying to emphasise to voters that spending cuts mean unpopular reductions in services, such as health and local authorities.
The last year, said Mr Mandelson, “has exposed the limits of David Cameron’s modernising rhetoric. The veil is being lifted.
“Their only answer to the global financial crisis has been one of retrenchment, regardless of the social consequences, recalling Conservative governments of the past,” he said.
Labour would safeguard key public services, protect nurses and teachers, but would also impose stiff constraints on spending, once the UK has emerged fully from the recession, he said.
The Conservatives, however, he said are wrong to claim that paying off the UK’s national debt – which has nearly doubled in two years – meant that “deep, savage, indiscriminate” cuts will happen, regardless of who wins next year’s election.
Predicting significant sales of state assets, he hinted that the proposed national identity card scheme, due to be trialled in Manchester next year, and the replacement of the Trident nuclear deterrent could face new examinations.
However, Mr Mandelson’s hints about the ID scheme came just as the home secretary, Alan Johnson, appointed a former Northern Ireland Office permanent secretary, Joseph Pilling, to be the independent commissioner to oversee it.
Despite declarations otherwise, the Labour Party has had to change its rhetoric, since up to the summer it was still promoting itself as “the party of investment” in public services, while the Tories were “the party of cuts”.
Public spending, which grew sharply under Tony Blair, “could not have continued to grow at the exceptional rates of the past decade”, even if the global economic crisis had not occurred, said Mr Mandelson.
“Having substantially renewed our infrastructure, our school buildings and the hospital estate, the profile of capital spending will not need to be the same as the last 10 years,” he said.