Shadow defence secretary Jim Murphy tells the Guardian the party must reject 'shallow and temporary' populism
Labour needs to avoid a populist approach, in which it opposes all government spending cuts, and instead build up credibility by outlining where the party would make savings, a leading member of the shadow cabinet has told the Guardian.
In a significant intervention in the internal debate on Labour's approach to the deficit, Jim Murphy, the shadow defence secretary, said he rejected "shallow and temporary" populism and pledged to accept £5bn of the government's planned cuts in defence.
The remarks by Murphy, who was joint campaign manager for David Miliband during the 2010 Labour leadership contest, come amid an intense shadow cabinet debate over the party's poor showing in opinion polls on the economy. A Guardian/ICM poll last month showed that David Cameron and George Osborne enjoy a commanding lead over Ed Miliband and Ed Balls on the economy.
Murphy said Labour needed to achieve "genuine credibility" on spending as he revealed he would accept £5bn of the government's defence cuts before a new defence review by Labour to be launched later this month.
"It is important to be both credible and popular when it comes to defence investment and the economics of defence," Murphy said. "There is a difference between populism and popularity. Credibility is the bridge away from populism and towards popularity. It is difficult to sustain popularity without genuine credibility. At a time on defence when the government is neither credible nor popular it is compulsory that Labour is both."
Murphy limited his remarks to his defence brief. But his intervention comes at a sensitive time for Ed Miliband, who was accused yesterday by his intellectual guru Lord Glasman of lacking a strategy, as members of the shadow cabinet express concern about the party's apparent lack of credibility on the economy.
The Labour leadership was recently criticised in a pamphlet by Policy Network, the thinktank established by Lord Mandelson, for "vagueness" in its approach to the deficit. The pamphlet, In the Black Labour, said the party was confirming "voters' worst suspicions about the party's lack of commitment to addressing the fiscal crisis". Balls, the shadow chancellor, moved to address these criticisms last month when he told the Independent he would turn round "public scepticism about Labour's willingness to take tough decisions on public spending".
Murphy is one of the first members of the shadow cabinet to follow the lead from Balls by giving a detailed breakdown of how Labour would accept £5bn of the government's defence cuts. These include:
• £2bn over 10 years by accepting the scrapping of the Nimrod MR4 surveillance aircraft.
• £900m over 10 years by making efficiencies in the Trident renewal programme through the submarine enterprise performance programme.
• A one-off saving of £350m from rationalising the defence estate.
• £205m by making cuts to civilian allowances. This will involve more means testing as the forces' welfare budget is targeted more effectively at members of the armed forces earning less than £20,000.
• An initial £35m by reducing tank regiments.
Labour will also accept the withdrawal in 2013 of the VC-10 transporter and tanker aircraft and the withdrawal from 2022 of the C-130J Hercules tactical transporter aircraft.
But the party cannot put an amount on these savings because the government has not released any figures. Murphy will do more work in this area, indicating that the £5bn figure could rise.
Murphy said of the £5bn of savings he would accept: "This is a through, forensic package which strengthens defence economic credibility and deals comprehensively with the idea that we oppose all cuts. The truth is the Labour party would have to make cuts if we were in power.
"Some of them are natural. We no longer face a threat of an invasion across the German plain. We don't need those tank regiments. Others are painful, such as targeted reductions in some welfare programmes."
But shadow defence secretary made clear that he would strongly oppose some cuts introduced in the government's Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) of October 2010.
He said: "You have others [cuts] that we will strongly oppose. The idea that you cannot deploy an aircraft carrier with aeroplanes on it for a decade – whatever way you do the sums it doesn't add up. It is not credible, it's not popular, it is not sustainable, it doesn't make sense. Across the world people are scratching their head at an island nation not being able to park an aircraft carrier off the coast of Libya."
Murphy is to bring together a group of academics and defence experts next month to carry out a review Britain's defence needs. This is designed to reassess the SDSR which has, according to Murphy, been overtaken by events. "When the government was doing its defence review it asked the wrong question. The question they asked was how much can they save rather than what is Britain's role in the world. This led them to the conclusion to have an 8% year on year cut. They came up with the wrong response to the wrong question. What we are approaching on defence is to come up with a different answer to the right question.
"The government's process has not survived the first contact with world events – the Arab spring, concerns about North Korea, heightened worries about Iran.
"An awful lot has changed in a short year. The government's review already looks out of date in contrast to George Robertson's [1998 strategic defence] review. Apart from the epoch changing events of 9/11 it remained strong and relevant. The government's one was out of date within a few months."
While Murphy accepts the scrapping of Nimrod, he was highly critical of the government for failing to replace the capability of the aircraft, which monitored the movements of Russian nuclear submarines.
"The government cut them up on live television. They treated probably the most expensive technically capable aircraft in our history like a second hand car. They just scrapped it and chopped it into pieces. What you can do is buy in a different kind of capability, possibly from the Americans, and refitting other airframes with some of the technology that would have been inside Nimrod.
Nimrod was the Rolls-Royce and it was treated like a secondhand car sent to scrap. Nimrod was an important part of the nuclear deterrent because it gave you the ability to know which other submarines were in the water when you were deploying your nuclear submarines.
"When they left the west coast of Scotland, you knew what was within a few hundred miles of them and what their unique signal would be. We would have filled the gap straight away," he said.