Labour needs to avoid a populist approach, in which it opposes all government spending cuts, and instead build up credibility by outlining where the party would make savings, a leading member of the shadow cabinet has told the Guardian.
In a significant intervention in the internal debate on Labour's approach to the deficit, Jim Murphy, the shadow defence secretary, said he rejected "shallow and temporary" populism and pledged to accept £5bn of the government's planned cuts in defence.
The remarks by Murphy, who was joint campaign manager for David Miliband during the 2010 Labour leadership contest, come amid an intense shadow cabinet debate over the party's poor showing in opinion polls on the economy. A Guardian/ICM poll last month showed that David Cameron and George Osborne enjoy a commanding lead over Ed Miliband and Ed Balls on the economy.
Murphy said Labour needed to achieve "genuine credibility" on spending as he revealed he would accept £5bn of the government's defence cuts before a new defence review by Labour to be launched later this month.
"It is important to be both credible and popular when it comes to defence investment and the economics of defence," Murphy said. "There is a difference between populism and popularity. Credibility is the bridge away from populism and towards popularity. It is difficult to sustain popularity without genuine credibility. At a time on defence when the government is neither credible nor popular it is compulsory that Labour is both."
Murphy limited his remarks to his defence brief. But his intervention comes at a sensitive time for Ed Miliband, who was accused yesterday by his intellectual guru Lord Glasman of lacking a strategy, as members of the shadow cabinet express concern about the party's apparent lack of credibility on the economy.
The Labour leadership was recently criticised in a pamphlet by Policy Network, the thinktank established by Lord Mandelson, for "vagueness" in its approach to the deficit. The pamphlet, In the Black Labour, said the party was confirming "voters' worst suspicions about the party's lack of commitment to addressing the fiscal crisis". Balls, the shadow chancellor, moved to address these criticisms last month when he told the Independent he would turn round "public scepticism about Labour's willingness to take tough decisions on public spending".
Murphy is one of the first members of the shadow cabinet to follow the lead from Balls by giving a detailed breakdown of how Labour would accept £5bn of the government's defence cuts. These include:
• £2bn over 10 years by accepting the scrapping of the Nimrod MR4 surveillance aircraft.
• £900m over 10 years by making efficiencies in the Trident renewal programme through the submarine enterprise performance programme.
• A one-off saving of £350m from rationalising the defence estate.
• £205m by making cuts to civilian allowances. This will involve more means testing as the forces' welfare budget is targeted more effectively at members of the armed forces earning less than £20,000.
• An initial £35m by reducing tank regiments.
Labour will also accept the withdrawal in 2013 of the VC-10 transporter and tanker aircraft and the withdrawal from 2022 of the C-130J Hercules tactical transporter aircraft.
But the party cannot put an amount on these savings because the government has not released any figures. Murphy will do more work in this area, indicating that the £5bn figure could rise.
Murphy said of the £5bn of savings he would accept: "This is a through, forensic package which strengthens defence economic credibility and deals comprehensively with the idea that we oppose all cuts. The truth is the Labour party would have to make cuts if we were in power.
"Some of them are natural. We no longer face a threat of an invasion across the German plain. We don't need those tank regiments. Others are painful, such as targeted reductions in some welfare programmes."
But shadow defence secretary made clear that he would strongly oppose some cuts introduced in the government's Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) of October 2010.
He said: "You have others [cuts] that we will strongly oppose. The idea that you cannot deploy an aircraft carrier with aeroplanes on it for a decade – whatever way you do the sums it doesn't add up. It is not credible, it's not popular, it is not sustainable, it doesn't make sense. Across the world people are scratching their head at an island nation not being able to park an aircraft carrier off the coast of Libya."
Murphy is to bring together a group of academics and defence experts next month to carry out a review Britain's defence needs. This is designed to reassess the SDSR which has, according to Murphy, been overtaken by events. "When the government was doing its defence review it asked the wrong question. The question they asked was how much can they save rather than what is Britain's role in the world. This led them to the conclusion to have an 8% year on year cut. They came up with the wrong response to the wrong question. What we are approaching on defence is to come up with a different answer to the right question.
"The government's process has not survived the first contact with world events – the Arab spring, concerns about North Korea, heightened worries about Iran.
"An awful lot has changed in a short year. The government's review already looks out of date in contrast to George Robertson's [1998 strategic defence] review. Apart from the epoch changing events of 9/11 it remained strong and relevant. The government's one was out of date within a few months."
While Murphy accepts the scrapping of Nimrod, he was highly critical of the government for failing to replace the capability of the aircraft, which monitored the movements of Russian nuclear submarines.
"The government cut them up on live television. They treated probably the most expensive technically capable aircraft in our history like a second hand car. They just scrapped it and chopped it into pieces. What you can do is buy in a different kind of capability, possibly from the Americans, and refitting other airframes with some of the technology that would have been inside Nimrod.
Nimrod was the Rolls-Royce and it was treated like a secondhand car sent to scrap. Nimrod was an important part of the nuclear deterrent because it gave you the ability to know which other submarines were in the water when you were deploying your nuclear submarines.
"When they left the west coast of Scotland, you knew what was within a few hundred miles of them and what their unique signal would be. We would have filled the gap straight away," he said.
Comments
5 January 2012 9:07PM
Surely the whole point of being in Opposition is you have to 'oppose' the Government?
5 January 2012 9:08PM
Only 13 years too late...
5 January 2012 9:09PM
"Labour told to accept spending cuts to be credible"
Austerity is a hugely hypocritical POLITICAL settlement not an economic one. As I have just posted on the blog about infant class sizes and the lib dem council asking the government to relax the sizes.
"4 weeks ago Osborne came to the Dispatch box to tell everyone - the whole nation - about how austerity would be with us for years.
A week after he then gave out an average £210,000 bonus to 24,000 City workers in a bank owned 83% by the State.
Just 1 x £210,000 bonus could have paid for 10 teachers at £21,000 a year."
You see? One rule for the rich and the bankers who give the Tories 50% of their party funds, and one rule for the majority who are paying for minority greed with austerity.
5 January 2012 9:09PM
That's rich coming from them - Shallow and temporary populism is all Cameron does, and fails miserably at that too.
5 January 2012 9:10PM
We need a fucking opposition.
5 January 2012 9:10PM
So now that the 3 main parties are all thatcherite is there anyone who believes that this country is not completely fukced?
5 January 2012 9:10PM
It's not credible to force the poor to pay for a crisis they didn't cause.
5 January 2012 9:12PM
Wow! Even Dim Jim knows this and the rest cant figure it out.
5 January 2012 9:12PM
Maybe it's my stupidity, but I thought there was a consensus in British, nay Western, politics, that cuts were neccessary. Labour's line has been simply not to cut 'too far and too fast'. I don't think there's anything new here.
5 January 2012 9:13PM
Methinks a plot is afoot..
5 January 2012 9:14PM
Credible to which group though?
Leaders of the finance industry? Big business?
Folk who live in the south-east - where there are still some jobs?
Or those who are afraid of losing jobs and houses, workers in the NHS watching the creeping privatization of hospitals and care?
The service personnel watching the award of private contracts and debasement of their service?
Or the disabled, sick and poor?
Exactly who will vote for Labour if they don't make a stand against the selling off of this country and the scapegoating of the disadvantaged?
5 January 2012 9:14PM
...is he not better off telling his party?
5 January 2012 9:15PM
The Labour Party, in its present incarnation, is irrelevant.
5 January 2012 9:15PM
That doesn't mean arguing that the sky isn't blue.
Labour have to accept that cuts have to be made. They are perfectly entitled to disagree with where the Tories are making the cuts, and suggest how they themselves would do it were they in power.
5 January 2012 9:15PM
Do these spending cuts include scrapping Iain Duncan Smith's colossal vanity project, The Work Programme, costing 7 billion and rising to give Tesco and the like free workers at the tax payer's expense, and predicted to have worse results than if it didn't exist at all in finding the unemployed real jobs?
5 January 2012 9:15PM
It makes economic sense Dim Jim. We use a French one.....stooooopid!
They use ours when they're built. Saves lots, Dim Jim.
5 January 2012 9:16PM
You don't have to oppose every single government proposal to oppose the government. This policy is sensible and shows that Labour won't oppose everything for the sake of it.
5 January 2012 9:16PM
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5 January 2012 9:16PM
Except the poor aren't paying for it. The taxpayer in general is. And the vast majority of tax is paid by the wealthiest 10%.
5 January 2012 9:16PM
Well that's Ed's strategy down the shitter then. Better come up with some real opposition policies.
5 January 2012 9:16PM
This follows on from Liam Byrne's comments re benefits such as housing benefit and unemployment benefit; it is frankly unbelievable! Housing benefit for example benefits the LANDLORD.
Why does the Shadow Defence Secretary not stick to his job and set about re-defining our sphere of influence; we do not want to go EAST of Suez ! We should be prepared to defend Europe; and that is all !
Has he less guts than Macmillan ?
5 January 2012 9:17PM
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5 January 2012 9:17PM
True to a point, but not so far as to argue against the government when they suggest that the world is round.
Can't see it happening myself mind - it's far too easy to rant on about cuts in the expectation that the public won't start blaming those who piled up the debt in the first place.
5 January 2012 9:18PM
As others have pointed out, what Murphy is saying reflects labour policy anyway. The cost of bailing out the banks has to be paid for somehow. However, the two main parties (I think we can forget about the LibDems for the forseeable future, possibly forever) can't go into the next election just saying, "Hey, we can manage austerity better than those guys". They've got to offer something to the public, most of whom will be pretty pissed off by that time.
5 January 2012 9:18PM
Wankers like this should accept that the BANKERS ought to be held accountable and that the public sector is being used as a diversion to prevent the greedy sods from paying up.
5 January 2012 9:18PM
Your username has become hilariously ironic.
5 January 2012 9:18PM
Erm, Osborne doesn't own the banks, nor does he give out bonuses. Nor does he have the power to stop banks paying bonuses.
When Labour bailed the banks out they had the power to set terms. So blame them.
In any case, it's an irrelevence.
5 January 2012 9:19PM
Nu Labour have nowhere to go. They are now a neo-liberal party who are so similar to the conservatives, and so discredited given their record in office that they can't offer a viable opposition.
If they are carrying neo-liberal tools like Murphy they will never provide any realistic sort of opposition to the coalition. A clear out is required, but I suspect that as Milibean and Balls and the rest of the leadership are cut from the same cloth as Blair and Brown they won't have the guts to change anything.
5 January 2012 9:19PM
Obviously there needs to be some cuts, Labour is playing a dangerous game by not announcing any cuts what so ever. How ever there is a very valid point, it is that the cuts are not working and they will cause another recession.
For all the talk about how the Coalition saved Britain from turning into Greece, that remains to be seen. They keep cutting and cutting and their economy keeps shrinking and shrinking. The same will happen here, just not on such a drastic scale.
Britain needs an effective opposition to stand up to this government, otherwise we will stagnate for years like the Japanese.
5 January 2012 9:22PM
Ah, Jim Murphy, the NUS leader who went on to help impose tuition fees on students. Lovely to hear him talk about credibility there.
5 January 2012 9:23PM
What alternative would you propose?
5 January 2012 9:23PM
Opposition is a great place to be - meal ticket assured and you can rock the boat as much as you like. And of course, you can always take the moral high ground whenever and you never have to make difficult decisions..
If Labour cared about the working class of this nation it would have got its act together by now. It needs proper policies not the likes of Murphy and Lord Glasman spouting off to newspapers for their own personal esteem. The best current example of those who love opposition is of course Diane Abbott. Claire Short was another and she even hankered for opposition when she was a government minister.
I really do despair about Labour these days. They seem to enjoy opposition more than power.
5 January 2012 9:24PM
The Conservative Coalition cuts are daily damaging Britain's economy.
Murphy needs to explain why his cuts are different, who they will affect, and how the wealthy really will shoulder their fair share of the bankers' debts.
5 January 2012 9:24PM
Ed Balls' argument "too hard, too fast" is perfectly credible. The speed and ferocity of these cuts are purely down to Tory ideology (the sort where John Redwood says it "makes people more Tory").
Black Labour? Jesus wept.
5 January 2012 9:25PM
So Jim "Dim" Murphy (5 watts) dosent know that we have access to the only nuclear powered carrier outside the US Navy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Gaulle_(R_91)
5 January 2012 9:25PM
But if the Labour party, so heroically led by adenoidal Ed rejects 'shallow and temporary populism', the cupboard will be pretty bare...
5 January 2012 9:26PM
How much were bank bonuses in 2009 when Brown went through his charade of imposing a 50% 'supertax' along with a knowing wink that it'd be ok to go ahead and double them? Where were you then?
5 January 2012 9:28PM
Surely Labour should be redefining Blair's interventionism; we can't afford these adventures and they are deeply mistaken.
Afghanistan will revert to Afghanistan in 2014. Iraq is traumatised by the waste of trillions of dollars.
Redefine the scope of our foreign policy and then define the military. The British people are sick of "Our Boys" dying on far off fields.
Promise to bring them home.
5 January 2012 9:28PM
More rubbish telling the Labour Party that it has to be even more like New Labour/the Conservatives to be relevant. Tempted to use the word 'bollocks' however will take a deep breath and respond politely........none of the mainstream parties are addressing the real problems we are facing as all fail to see beyond the economic orthodoxy introduced in the 1980s by Mme Thatcher and her ilk. It's failed, the problems created are getting worse and yet we are being told that even more of the same rubbish policies that caused the problems we are living with are the solution.
....and breathe......I'm so sick of this propaganda being pushed at us day by day. Doesn't matter if we read the Daily Mail or The Guardian it's the same rubbish.
5 January 2012 9:29PM
How many monkeys do you have to come up with these gags for you?
5 January 2012 9:29PM
"Murphy limited his remarks to his defence brief."
So we have a shadow minister accepting cuts on defence policy only. But true to form, the Guardian spins this into a dig against Labour's opposition to cuts across the board.
On top of today's earlier Clegg love-in, this is just laughable.
5 January 2012 9:30PM
There is only one tiny wee snaglet in your argument.
There has been no cut in Government expenditure. Indeed, it's risen month by month, every month, since the election.
5 January 2012 9:31PM
1. Ed Balls will say 'too far, too fast' no matter what the pace of cuts. Maybe he's remembering Gordon's anguished cries with that soundbite.
2. Black Labour - do they go in for 'divide and conquer', or was that just the white variety?
5 January 2012 9:32PM
Is there really much point in voting any more?
5 January 2012 9:32PM
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5 January 2012 9:32PM
...so why the fuck do we bother to vote?!
5 January 2012 9:33PM
Only one. Dim Jim supplies the raw material.
5 January 2012 9:33PM
You win elections by getting more votes/seats areas as the legal system is set up. That means not doing the 'right thing' but doing the thing that gets you the most votes. I am pretty much sure what is 'right' in your mind in 'wrong' in mine. This is why Michael Foot was unelectable (extreme Left wing not job working for the Russians) and why the BNP will never get in (extreme right wing who may have some point to make but the British in general would never vote for them in numbers as they have too many looney divisive policies).
So, as a lot of the people of this country are all for "scapegoating of the disadvantaged' as you describe it but in our eyes , for right of for wrong do not see the disabled, but see the disabled welfare cheats in abundance, we do not see the genuinely unemployed but see the lifestyle choice spongers protected by the Guardian readership, we do not see the families trying to make end meets on welfare credits but see the payment of £40,000 in home rentals in Kensington to immigrant non-working families ....... and the story goes on, we will never vote for those who protect the sort of spongers, cheats and illegal immigrants whom Labour has protected and positively encouraged over the last 13 years.
Until Labour stop defending the indefensible and start playing majority politics again, they will never get back in power.
To do that, they will have to rein in the Unions so they stop looking like MIchael Foot all over again as the middle earners in the UK are only interested in a party which tries to support them, and don't really care about Bankers getting away with getting paid too much as thats an aspiration for everyone, but do have a real objection to spongers, cheats and welfare claimants who do nothing for their money.
Just my opinion of course.
5 January 2012 9:33PM
Good grief. The poorest taxpayers are paying a much higher percentage of their income than the 'richest' taxpayers and are, in addition, being hit by cuts that mean little or nothing to those self same richest taxpayers (tax avoiders more like). Your comment is an insult to the working people of our nation that are having their living standards and opportunities hammered by this God Forsaken coalition. Get a grip please.
5 January 2012 9:36PM
Spud Murphy! Can anyone believe how low the Labour party has sunk when this specimen is part of the front bench.
You and your party can buy into this austerity crap all you like.
Not for me thanks.
This country really is well and truly finished, all politicians are singing from the same hymn sheet and the penny has not yet dropped for the masses they are are heading towards destitution.
Unbelievable there is no fightback in this country, Dave and Gideon have a spring in their step and the working man thinks its all the fault of Bob Crow.
Its so sad its laughable.