Labour conference: Miliband and Balls talk inheritances

One of the more sombre passages in Ed Miliband’s barnstorming speech this afternoon was when he tackled the thorny issue of what a Labour government would actually do about the cuts. While both the Labour leader and Ed Balls are keen to regain the trust of the British public on the economy, they are also trying to introduce a counter-narrative to the ‘are you ready to trust Labour with your money again?‘ line that Nick Clegg produced last week. Just as George Osborne and colleagues have spent the first two and a half years selling the line that they are ‘clearing up the mess’ of the last Labour government, Miliband and Balls are now increasingly talking about the economic inheritance that a Labour government might receive in 2015.

In his speech today, the Labour leader said:

‘To be one nation, we’ve got to live within our means and because borrowing is getting worse not better, it means the cuts that this government made that we just won’t be able to reverse, even though we’d like to.