Miliband insists deficit 'priority'

24 September 2014 Last updated at 09:10

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Ed Miliband: "If I did the speech again today I'd do it differently"

Ed Miliband has admitted missing out a passage on the UK's financial deficit in his Labour Party conference speech.

In a round of media interviews he said "one of the perils" of delivering a speech without a script was "not remembering every detail".

But he insisted that he had set out how Labour would tackle the economy and immigration, despite forgetting bits on both that were in the full script.

Chancellor George Osborne said omitting the deficit was "extraordinary".

Mr Osborne tweeted after the speech: "Ed Miliband didn't mention the deficit once. Extraordinary. If you can't fix the economy you can't fund the NHS."

A pre-prepared text of the speech later emerged which included passages on a promise to "deal with our nation's debts" and another on immigration which Mr Miliband did not include in his conference speech in Manchester.

'Speaking style'

Mr Miliband had intended to say Labour would take a "tough new approach" on the deficit, pointing out that the £75bn annual level of borrowing Labour would inherit was larger than the entire schools budget.

He also planned to say Labour "would not have money to spend" after the election and a future government would have to "live within its means".

In the section on immigration, he was due to say "immigration benefits our country but those who come here have a responsibility to learn English and earn their way".

But, in his 65-minute address, the Labour leader made no mention of the public finances at all and made only a passing reference to immigration, when he accused David Cameron of pandering to the UK Independence Party.

The Labour leader told the BBC he "did not deliberately" drop the passages on the deficit and immigration, admitting the latter was "one section of the speech which I did not use".

He said he preferred not to give pre-prepared speeches as he believed people wanted to hear "directly" from him and it was the "style that worked for him".

"I write a speech and then I get up and use that as a framework for giving a sense to people where I think the country needs to go," he told Radio 4's Today programme.

"I add bits in and there are some things I did not say."

'Deficit signs'

But he insisted he had made clear that there would be no new borrowing to fund a £2.5bn cash injection into the NHS and Labour had already set out to plans to raise money through hiking the top rate of income tax, removing winter fuel allowance and freezing child benefit.

"Nobody should doubt our seriousness about tackling the deficit," he told Radio 4's Today programme, adding that shadow chancellor Ed Balls had set out a "clear plan" on Monday to balance the books by the end of the next Parliament.

"We have already show signs on the action we will take. It is tough and it is difficult but we have laid out some of those plans."

Labour's focus in government, he added, would be about "big reform not big spending and it about saying whenever we have a plan to spend extra resources it is clearly costed".

The absence of any mention of the deficit prompted criticism from business groups and was seized upon by Labour's opponents as evidence Mr Miliband is not ready for power.

The Lib Dems said the "rambling" speech was full of "underfunded promises" using "money that's been spent many times over".

Health pledge

On Wednesday Labour is to give more details of its plan for the NHS, after Miliband's pledge to "save and transform" it.

Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham will explain what a £2.5bn annual funding boost will mean for patients.

Mr Miliband has said a future Labour government would provide for 20,000 more nurses, 8,000 more GPs, 5,000 more care workers and 3,000 more midwives by 2020.

This would be paid for by a "mansion tax" on houses worth more than £2m, raising an estimated £1.2bn, a £1.1bn crackdown on tax loopholes used by hedge funds and a £150m levy on tobacco firms to contribute to the cost of treating smoking-related illnesses.

But BBC health correspondent Nick Triggle said it was "not yet clear" what Labour's £2.5bn pledge would mean for the NHS.

"The coalition government has actually increased the budget by a similar amount in cash terms, but that only equates to 0.1% rises each year in real terms once you factor in inflation," he said.

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