Last week’s spending review has been well discussed and debated.  Defending it on This Week and during some other interviews last week, I felt that Ed Balls’s ‘iron discipline’ speech and Ed Miliband’s One Nation Social Security speech provided a firm footing to avoid the political traps set by George Osborne.  Labour can’t be painted as fiscally profligate if we are maintaining 2015/16 spending envelopes.  We haven’t just accepted the idea of a welfare cap, but proposed how to reduce the underlying causes of benefit dependency – housing cost; worklessness and low pay.  Some have argued that we are fighting the next election on Tory territory.  I disagree.  We are preparing for it on the territory of deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility, but that’s where we should choose to be regardless of anything ‘Jeffrey’ Osborne announces.  But we are now beginning to set out our own context and choices for the task of governing in a period of fiscal challenge.

However, there are still some tricky questions to be answered and, whilst I don’t think now is necessarily the time for public announcements, I offer you these three morsels of ‘food for thought’.

Firstly, are we happy to maintain a ringfence on schools and NHS spending?  I’m not sure I am.  We have proposed a zero based budget review if we get into government which is absolutely right.  This needs to cover not only how we spend a set number of pounds on schools and the NHS, but also whether, for example, money spent by a local council on keeping an old person safe in their home could save more than if spent in the NHS having them treated and kept longer than necessary in a hospital.  To be fair, the government have recognised this through allocating an extra £2bn for social care.  However, Andy Burnham’s good ideas for an integrated health and care system cannot be delivered with a ringfenced ‘NHS’ budget.

Doesn’t the evidence suggest that early years education is fundamental for a child’s success in school, so why would we want to cut that provision simply to maintain spending in the school which will have to pay more anyway to put right the lack of reading and school preparedness that cuts to early years would create?  If we’re going to put all spending under scrutiny, we can’t afford to leave out 60% of departmental spend however politically important it is.

Secondly, as well as determining how much public spending we allocate, we could ask further questions about how it’s divided up and who spends it.  ‘Bungle’ Osborne made a pretty timid announcement last week about the Heseltine proposed ‘single pot’ where central funding aimed at economic growth is devolved to Local Enterprise Partnerships.  Heseltine argued for £49bn over four years from 2015.  Osborne proposed a mere £2bn a year.  I know from discussions in government on local government single pot proposals that once a minister has her hands on a funding stream, it’s difficult to prise money and control away!  So opposition has to be the time that we think radically about pooling funding, devolving responsibility to local government without funding strings or silos and the principle of ‘subsidiarity’ spelt out in Steve Reed and Paul Brant’s chapter for the Purple Book.

Finally, I bring you the thorny topic of tax.  I don’t want Labour campaigning on the slogan ‘Vote Labour for higher taxes’  However, last week’s spending review announcements have, according to the IFS, shifted the split between spending cuts and tax increases away from the 80% cuts, 20% taxes originally planned, to an 85%-15% split

Getting back even to the 80%-20% balance would require a £6bn tax increase after the next election.  If we add into this reckoning the fact that a further effective council tax squeeze is undermining the only property based tax which we have, there are some important questions to be asked about what we tax and what rate we tax it at.  We’ve made a good start with the 10p tax pledge and talk of a mansion tax, but without providing ammunition for others to fire at us, I hope we have all started thinking about the principles that should underlie how we can ensure taxation, as well as an ‘iron discipline’ on spending can contribute to our fiscal plans.