Ed Balls attacks Coalition ‘failure’ as Osborne sticks to austerity plan

Ed Balls today attacked George Osborne’s Autumn Statement as “unfair, incompetent and totally out of touch”. The shadow chancellor slammed the Coalition mini-budget and said it showed the “full scale of this government’s economic failure”.

In a swipe at his Tory opponent Mr Balls said Mr Osborne was delivering a slower economic recovery “than at any point in the last hundred years”.

With the Chancellor set to signal that Britain’s age of austerity will have to last longer than previously feared, Mr Balls said the “defining purpose” of the Government is now “in tatters”.

Mr Balls said: “Today — after two and a half years — we can see the full scale of this government’s economic failure. Our economy stagnant this year, government borrowing and the deficit revised up. £212 billion more borrowing than he planned two years ago.

"The national debt rising — not falling. And it is people who are already struggling to make ends meet — middle and lower income families and pensioners — who are paying the price.”

He said: “The defining purpose of this government, the cornerstone of this coalition, the one test they set themselves — to balance the books and get the debt falling by 2015 — is now in tatters.”

Mr Osborne yesterday told Cabinet colleagues that he is releasing £5 billion for capital projects, mainly funded by cutting Whitehall departmental spending by one per cent next year and two per cent the following year.

But Mr Balls today warned that the economy will keep tanking under the Government’s plans.

He said: “Far from securing the recovery, our economy has flat-lined since the Spending Review in 2010. Over the last two years the Chancellor was expecting our economy to have grown by 4.6 per cent.

“But it has actually grown by just 0.6 per cent, compared with 1.7 per cent in France, 3.6 per cent in Germany, and 4.1 per cent in America.

“After the longest double dip recession since the Second World War, this Chancellor is now delivering a slower recovery than at any point in the last hundred years.”