Balls urged to push harder on growth

Labour needs a more ambitious Plan B to boost employment and growth, featuring “major” tax cuts and a significant job creation scheme, a left-leaning think-tank said today.

The Fabian Society backed shadow chancellor Ed Balls’s judgment that the government is cutting “too far, too fast” and that Chancellor George Osborne needs to change course now to revive faltering growth.

But the Fabians described Mr Balls’s five-point plan – including a temporary VAT cut, investment in infrastructure, national insurance breaks for small business and a tax on bankers’ bonuses – as “small beer” compared to the scale of the crisis the UK faces.

Today’s report, entitled The Economic Alternative, backed his decision not to promise to reverse coalition cuts if Labour wins the next election