Manchester - Britain's new opposition leader Ed Miliband was urged on Monday to put forward realistic and credible plans to cut the budget deficit or risk another election defeat for his Labour Party.
Alistair Darling, Labour finance minister until the party lost power in May to a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, delivered the warning to a party conference two days after Miliband, 40, was elected as leader.
“People know there is a deficit. They know it needs to come down. And if you deny that, frankly people will not listen to you, they will walk away and it will have a disastrous consequence (at the next election),” Darling said.
The left-leaning Miliband, who won a tight leadership contest thanks to trade union support, has said Darling's plan to halve Britain's record peacetime budget deficit in four years is a “starting point” that could be improved by, for example, raising taxes on banks.
Labour's policy was already less ambitious than the coalition government's plans to slash public spending to almost eliminate the deficit, equivalent to 11 percent of Gross Domestic Product, by the time of the next election in 2015.
Miliband has attacked those plans as “economically dangerous” and said he backs “cautious” spending cuts.
Darling, who led the Labour government's response to the financial crisis but is about to step down as Labour's finance spokesman, said any new deficit-cutting plan must be credible.
“It's got to strike a chord with millions of ordinary people as being realistic and credible,” Darling told Labour's annual conference in the northwestern city of Manchester.
Labour must stay in the centre ground of British politics, Darling said. - Reuters