Jim Murphy has insisted he and Ed Balls are “singing from the same hymn sheet” on Labour’s spending plans.
The Scottish Labour leader was forced to deny he is at odds with UK party colleagues after shadow chancellor Mr Balls said he could not guarantee Scotland an exemption from spending cuts a Labour government would have to make.
Opponents claimed Mr Murphy had been “hung out to dry” as Mr Balls’s comments appeared to contradict those the Scottish leader made in last week’s televised General Election debates.
In a further twist, shadow business secretary Chukka Umunna told BBC’s Daily Politics: “The leader of the Scottish Labour Party will not be in charge of the UK budget.”
Speaking on a visit to a nursery in Cumbernauld today, Mr Murphy denied that the message of fiscal responsibility set out by Mr Miliband at the UK party’s manifesto launch was unhelpful for his campaign in Scotland.
He said: “I think Scots have a tradition of being people who are canny about wanting to balance the books. I know that’s a generalisation but that’s part of our zeitgeist, that we want to balance the books, and that’s what we’ll do. The issue is about how you do it.
“The Tories want to cut public spending ever deeper and the SNP want to cut Scotland off from the rest of the UK when it comes to pooling and sharing resources and taxes.
“There’s a different way of doing it, which is balance the books through targeted savings that are fairer and then continued economic growth.
“Ed Balls and I last week were out campaigning together and we’re singing from the same hymn sheet on this.”
The Scottish Labour leader said savings could be achieved through policies such as cutting winter fuel allowances for the wealthiest pensioners, capping child benefit rises for two years and restoring the 50p top rate of income tax.
He said: “I’ve been clear from the beginning that we’ll have to make savings, I’ve said it in each interview that we have to balance the books.
“Ed and I were campaigning last week and the week before in Scotland and we’ve both been very clear that we have to make savings, we have to balance the books.
“It isn’t all about cuts, it’s just a different approach to how we run our economy, which is we want more people out earning decent wages, paying taxes rather than subsidising low pay and that’s a much more effective way of having economic growth.”
Mr Murphy denied the Scottish Labour Party was in danger of once again being branded a “branch office” of the UK party, as his predecessor Johann Lamont claimed when she stood down from the role last year.
He said: “The size of the budget is determined by the Labour Party as a whole, that’s clear, that’s always been the case… how the money is spent in Scotland is a decision for the Scottish Labour Party when it comes to these devolved policies like health and education.
“You’ll see in our manifesto later in the week just how we’ll spend this money and that’s a decision for the Scottish Labour Party and no one else.”
He insisted the party was still capable of turning around the polls, after a TNS survey put Labour on 24% of the vote and the SNP on 52% in Scotland.
He said: “We’ve got less than three weeks to turn that around but I’m confident we can and confident we will. I’m confident the night before the election we’ll be having a different conversation.
“In Glasgow there’s almost 40% undecided, this election has only just begun. There’s a long, long way to go and in a lot of constituencies more than a third of all the voters are undecided.
“I know most of those people are people who have traditionally voted Labour and we’re making a vast effort in talking to them each individually because they’ll decide the outcome of the election here in Scotland and with the polls being so tight, across the rest of the UK.
“Up to a third of Scottish voters who are undecided, they’ll decide the fate of the entire UK election.”