Battle begins as Tories point to £20bn cost of Labour

Mr Miliband’s attempt to kickstart the 2015 General Election campaign with a message of making politics work for the many quickly saw the Labour Party having to switch to defending wide ranging spending commitments following a Tory ambush.

Five Cabinet-level ministers, led by Chancellor George Osborne, staged a joint press conference to highlight what the Tories called a dossier of unfunded spending commitments made by Labour’s front bench team since 2010.

If Labour backed all the changes and cuts U-turns mentioned over the last four years, the Tories said, the UK would have to find an extra £20bn in funding commitments.

Labour rejected the figure and warned that there was a “real fear” about the impact of the scale of spending cuts planned by the Tories on public services, including the NHS.

“In the next four months, there will be the usual sound and fury,” Mr Miliband said.

“But it will all actually come down to something rather simple. Who we are. How we want to live together. And how we succeed as a nation.

“This is nothing less than a once-in-a-generation fight about who our country works for.

“It is a choice between a Tory plan where only a few at the top can succeed and our public services are threatened.

“Or a Labour plan that puts working people first, deals with the deficit and protects our NHS.”

Mr Osborne was backed by cabinet ministers when he said the country could only pay for a string NHS if the economy continued to grow.

The British people have a clear choice at the next election - continue on the road to a stronger economy with a competent Conservative team that have a long-term plan, or choose the chaos of over £20 billion of unfunded spending promises, higher taxes and more borrowing offered by the alternatives which would take us back to the economic mess Britain was in five years ago.

“Competence or chaos. That is the choice. Let’s not throw it all away, let’s work through the plan.”

Commons Leader Mr Hague warned that a Labour government would mean higher taxes and higher mortgage rates, while the Home Secretary accused the Opposition of having nearly £1 billion of unfunded commitments across the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice in 2015/16.

But the claims made in the A Cost Analysis Of Labour Party Policy report quickly came under intense scrutiny after it emerged that some of the figures were based on a presumption that where Labour had criticised a Government policy, they would reverse it.

Shadow chancellor Ed Balls said: “This dodgy Tory dossier is riddled with untruths and errors on every page.”

Many of the claims in the document were based on comments made by front bench MPs but later not adopted as party polices, Labour later indicated, including a ban on sending food waste to landfills which would is included as a £477m cost in the dossier but was never formally adopted by Labour.