A few weeks ago, a shadow minister urging Labour to avoid ‘shallow and temporary’ populism over spending cuts might have seemed like a sally against the party’s Ballsist wing. But given that Ed Balls has since said that ‘Labour will give more details of its tough spending decisions [in 2012]’, then Jim Murphy’s intervention in the Guardian today is a little less provacative than that. In truth, the shadow defence secretary’s words fit perfectly into Labour’s plan to sound more fiscally responsible this year. It is, most likely, party policy dressed up as a clarion call.
What’s striking is that Murphy goes beyond this simple rhetoric, becoming the first shadow minister to give some of those ‘details’ that Balls mentioned. He lists £5 billion worth of the government’s defence cuts that Labour would sign up to, including £2 billion from the scrapping of Nimrod.
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