No clash over cuts – Murphy
AN EMBATTLED Jim Murphy insisted he and Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls were ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’ on spending cuts yesterday.
After a torrid couple of days, with devastating polling predicting a Scottish apocalypse for Labour, and senior party figures undermining his promise to end austerity north of the Border, he attempted to come out fighting.
However, that involved being accompanied to a nursery in Cumbernauld, North Lanarkshire, by three police officers. Mr Murphy, who was egged while campaigning for the Union during the referendum, probably felt the protection he needed had been from his own party in recent days.
Mr Balls warned Scotland could not be protected from spending cuts, while Shadow Business Minister Chuka Umunna was even more brutal, saying the Scots leader ‘will not be in charge of the UK budget’.
But yesterday, Mr Murphy insisted there was no clash with UK Labour’s insistence on more cuts.
‘Scots have a tradition of being people who are canny about wanting to balance the books. That’s a generalisation but that’s part of our zeitgeist, we want to balance the books, and that’s what we’ll do. The issue is about how you do it,’ he said.
‘The Tories want to cut public spending deeper and the SNP want to cut Scotland off from the rest of the UK when it comes to pooling and sharing resources and taxes.
‘There’s a different way of doing it, which is to balance the books through targeted savings that are fairer and then continued economic growth. Ed Balls and I last week were out campaigning together and we’re singing from the same hymn sheet on this.’
The Scottish Labour leader said savings could be achieved through policies such as cutting winter fuel allowances for the wealthiest pensioners, capping child benefit rises for two years and restoring the 50p top rate of income tax.
He added: ‘I’ve been clear from the beginning that we’ll have to make savings, I’ve said it in each interview that we have to balance the books.
‘Ed and I were campaigning last week and the week before in Scotland and we’ve both been very clear that we have to make savings, we have to balance the books.
‘It isn’t all about cuts, it’s just a different approach to how we run our economy, which is we want more people out earning decent wages, paying taxes rather than subsidising low pay and that’s a much more effective way of having economic growth.’
But a buoyant SNP, which has been polling at an extraordinary 52 per cent this week, sought to capitalise on claims that Labour had ‘given up on Scotland’.
Angus Robertson, SNP campaign director, said: ‘Jim Murphy’s entire campaign has collapsed in Scotland, with his Westminster party leaders putting him in his place as the head of a “branch office” – and making it crystal clear that Labour would impose cuts to Scotland’s budget.’