Balls tells BBC: “There will have to be cuts. But we will make different choices”

Ahead of the Autumn Statement on Wednesday, Ed Balls has been doing a media round (which will continue for much of the week). This evening he was interviewed by Nick Robinson for the Six o’clock news, and the Shadow Chancellor told the BBC’s Political Editor that “There will have to be cuts. But we will make different choices”. Here’s the key quote from the interview:

“The deficit is big and it’s not come down the way the government promised.  There’s going to be tough decisions after the next election. There will have to be cuts. But we will make different choices. A Labour government will get the deficit down in a fairer way, but also we’ll tackle the underlying cause of this problem because we now know low-paid jobs, stagnating wages is not bringing in the tax receipts that the Chancellor needs to get the deficit down. So we’ll be tough on the deficit and tough on the causes of the deficit too.”

None of this is particularly new – indeed Balls has been clear for some time that a Labour government would still have to make painful public sector cuts. But the key lines that Balls will want to focus on are “The deficit is big and it’s not come down the way the government promised” and that the recovery “is not bringing in the tax receipts that the Chancellor needs to get the deficit down”. That echoes Ed Miliband’s comments earlier today about the government’s £116.5 billion cost of living crisis failure.

And of course there’s a fascinating echo from Balls (for so long a key Brownite) of Tony Blair’s “touch on crime, tough on the causes of crime” too. That’s poignant, of course, because Gordon Brown is stepping down as an MP this evening.