“Are you ready to trust Labour with your money again?”, asked Nick Clegg in his conference speech. The announcement by Ed Balls that Labour, if elected, would hold a “zero-based spending review” is an admission that he still needs to convince voters that they can answer “yes”. The record £159bn deficit may have been a consequence, rather than a cause, of the economic crisis but Balls rightly recognises that Labour didn’t always spend wisely in office.
A zero-based review (an idea proposed last December by In The Black Labour) differs from others in that it requires every item of spending to be approved, rather than merely changes to a pre-determined baseline. In other words, nothing is off the table. As Balls says in his interview with the Guardian:
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