Confident Ed Miliband sets out Labour’s manifesto

The expectant queue stood in line at the old Granada TV studios in Manchester yesterday morning as the bus carrying some of Labour’s team arrived for the launch of the party’s election manifesto.

The spectators were there, however, not for Labour but to visit the Coronation Street set, including the frontage of the Rovers Return and Wetherfield's police station.

Inside, several hundred party supporters – screened and checked against lists – cheered Ed Miliband as he came on stage, as the sounds of Royal Blood's Out of the Black faded.

The musical choice was, perhaps, inappropriate since so much of the next hour was occupied by Miliband pledging to put the United Kingdom “into the black” – but in a qualified way – over the next five years.

Miliband, saying he was “going into an election doing what no other Labour leader has done” before, said spending – outside of health, education and overseas aid – would be cut.

He pledged to cut the deficit each year until 2020, and said the UK’s current account would be brought into surplus “as soon as possible”, while national debt would be falling by the next election.

“I think there are lots of people at home who are thinking to themselves, ‘I like Labour values, I like what Labour is putting forward, I want to know it adds up,’” he said.

The “budgetary responsibility lock” – one that fills the first page of Labour’s election manifesto – declares the party’s virtue: every pledge is costed, none require extra borrowing.

However, the fact that it has had to be made nearly 10 days into the campaign highlights Labour’s five-year-old inability to recover the reputation for economic competence so hard won in Tony Blair’s early years.

Long despondent, there are signs, however, that there is a rising confidence within Labour’s ranks, on the back of a few poor days campaigning for the Conservatives.

Firstly, the Conservatives were on the wrong side of the debate about taxes for wealthy “non-doms”(domiciles). Then, they rushed out proposals to block above-inflation train prices, something they had previously described as bizarre.

And finally, they pledged £8 billion more for the National Health Service. However, the chancellor George Osborne was unable to say where the money would come from when pressed by the BBC's Andrew Marr on Sunday.

Labour is pushing against public opinion – which does not like the effect of spending cuts, but, broadly, reluctantly accepts the need for some of them. The party refuses to accept that pre-2010 spending was out of control.

“[The Conservatives] say the deficit caused the financial crisis. The opposite is true, it was the financial crisis that caused the deficit to go as high as it did,” said a confident, bullish Miliband. However, Miliband’s pledges carry no guarantee that the deficit – standing at £90 billion this year – would be eliminated if he occupies No 10.

Reviewing the numbers, Paul Johnson of the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) said getting rid of the current spending deficit, ie excluding capital spending, "would not be a terribly difficult hurdle" given expected growth figures.

Such vagueness will be useful if Labour wins. The question is whether it is believed, since it allows Labour to portray itself as a party of fiscal rectitude, but just not too much of it.

Earlier, Labour’s Ed Balls performed the role of Iron Chancellor, insisting that Scotland – where Labour could win, or lose – cannot be exempt from UK-wide spending cuts.

Extra spending

But still he talked of £800 million worth of extra spending that could go Scotland’s way but did not say how. Nor did Miliband subsequently clear up the lack of clarity.

Labour is fighting two campaigns: competing with the Conservatives in England on fiscal rigour and against the Scottish National Party north of the border on exactly the opposite.

“Some parties are coming along and saying that we don’t have to make any difficult decisions, no reduction in spending at all and that it is all going to be easy,” Miliband said.

The danger lies in incoherence. For days, Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy has insisted that no cuts would be necessary after 2016, quoting one IFS estimate that Labour could add £10 billion to spending.

Murphy was slapped down publicly by Labour’s shadow business secretary, Chuka Umunna: “The leader of the Scottish Labour party will not be in charge of the UK budget.

“The leader of our country, the next prime minister Ed Miliband, will be in charge of the UK budget,” he said, emphasising that there will be “cuts throughout the rest of the parliament”.

The Umunna/Murphy clash is real in some parts, but some of it is pantomime politics, necessary for the day. However, Labour's confidence at the home of Coronation Street yesterday showed that dreams do not exist just on TV soaps.