Labour will be 'ruthless' about cutting public spending, admits Ed Balls "The public want to know that we are going to be ruthless and disciplined in how we go about public spending," Mr Balls said in a newspaper interview. For a Labour government in 2015, it is quite right, and the public I think would expect this, to have a proper zero-based spending review where we say we have to justify every penny and make sure we are spending in the right way. In a dig at David Cameron, he said not even the £12 billion foreign aid budget would be exempt from scrutiny. The Prime Minister has been criticised by backbenchers for letting hundreds of millions of pounds in overseas aid go to consultancies. The shadow chancellor said there would some commitments on spending and taxation in the party's manifesto but it would be more difficult to make decisions set in stone. Mr Balls' language is likely to antagonise the unions and has already put him slightly at odds with Harriet Harman, the deputy Labour leader. She told The Spectator that Labour would not be "signing up" to the kind of spending cuts seen in the Coalition. "Our argument against the Tories is that the scale and pace of their deficit reduction is self-defeating and hurting the economy and therefore making less money available," she said. So we have got a fundamental economic critique - we would not be signing up to doing the very thing we think is hurting the economy.