Balls isn’t planning a “spending spree”. The truth is the opposite – and it’s going to be brutal

There’s a splash on the front page of The Times this morning that the Labour leadership won’t be especially happy about. The story itself – that Labour has left the door open to borrowing for investment – isn’t a secret. In fact, that was made pretty clear in the speech Ed Balls gave to the Fabians on Saturday whilst announcing the pledge – as George Eaton noted at the time.

Borrowing for infrastructure spending is eminently sensible, it stimulates growth – and it’s the difference between borrowing to buy your groceries on a credit card (FYI – bad idea) and borrowing to buy a house (which considering the government funded housing boom that is “Help to Buy”, is a good idea). What’ll bother Miliband and Balls will be the spin put upon that quite reasonable state of affairs by the Tories, and gobbled up by The Times.

The last thing Ed Balls will have wanted to see this week were claims that he wants to go on a “spending spree”. He absolutely doesn’t. And to show how untrue that is, lets take a look at how brutal the targets that Balls has just signed up to are. Further down the Times piece, there’s a crucial bit of detail:

“Under projections by the Office for Budget Responsibility, a future Conservative government would seek about £37.6 billion in spending cuts over three years from 2016. Labour would have to find approximately £13 billion in cuts during the same period to adhere to its new rules.

The cuts in the next Parliament are expected to be considerably more painful than the £37.6 billion reduction in spending since 2010, since all the easy savings have already been made.”

So George Osborne plans on making as many cuts in the next parliament as he already has so far. Except this time, all of the “easy savings” have been made. The meat has already been carved off the carcass – the 2015 parliament will start working on what’s left of the bones. And this level of cuts is – give or take – what Ed Balls has signed up to by pledging to achieve a surplus in the next parliament. All he’s done is keep the possibility open of some borrowing to invest – like those with mortgages do every single day. All he’s done is say that – on one particular metric – he might slash a little less deep than a brutalist axe-man.

Far from a spending spree, it’s going to be another painful few years of cuts, whoever wins next time. But that’s not the impression you’d have received from reading the headline of The Times this morning…