Labour should have done more to cut the deficit, Burnham says

Labour leadership hopeful Andy Burnham has admitted that Labour “should have done more to tackle [the] deficit in the middle of the last decade, so that we were better prepared when the crisis hit.”

 

Writing in City A.M. today Burnham says: “Small though it was, we were still running a deficit at the peak of a booming economy.” He added that despite the fact that the last Labour government ran more surplus than the Tories managed to in 18 years, he needed to be “honest” about the past to get a fair hearing for the party’s plans for the future.

 

Burnham writes that Labour failed to convince business owners and employees alike that the party, “understood their challenges [and] was on their side”. To remedy this, he pledged to replace business rates with a land value tax as part of a wider review of business taxation, and give the Green Investment Bank “serious powers to borrow and invest”.