.
Britain's new opposition leader said on Tuesday economic policy should focus on growth, not just cutting the budget deficit, and he would not support irresponsible strikes against planned spending cuts.
Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, 40, set out in his first speech to the party's annual conference to tackle concerns that he would be lax on cutting the deficit or would be a left-winger in the pocket of the trade unions.
Labour was ejected from power after 13 years in May's election, replaced by a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition that plans deep spending cuts to reduce a record peacetime budget deficit left behind by Labour.
"I won't oppose every cut the coalition proposes," Miliband told the conference in the northwestern city of Manchester.
"And come the next election there will be some things they have done that I will not be able to reverse," he said.
Miliband surprisingly beat his older brother David to become Labour leader on Saturday thanks to strong union support, prompting accusations he would be beholden to the unions.
"I have no truck, and you should have no truck, with overblown rhetoric about waves of irresponsible strikes. The public won't support them. I won't support them. And you shouldn't support them either," he said in his speech.
With public concern about the impact of cuts growing, Labour edged ahead of the centre-right Conservatives for the first time in three years in a YouGov opinion poll published in the Sun newspaper on Tuesday.
SERIOUS ABOUT DEFICIT
Miliband said he was serious about reducing the deficit.
"But what we should not do as a country is make a bad situation worse by embarking on deficit reduction at a pace and in a way that endangers our recovery," he said.
"The starting point for a responsible plan is to halve the deficit over four years, but growth is our priority and we must remain vigilant against a downturn," he said.
Without a plan for growth, there would be no credible plan for deficit reduction, he said.
Labour fought the election on proposals to halve the deficit in four years, less ambitious than coalition plans to virtually eliminate the deficit by 2015, when the next election is due.
Miliband has said the era of "New Labour" — former Prime Minister Tony Blair's brand of centrist, business-friendly politics that won him three elections — is over.
But he rejected the "Red Ed" nickname he has been given by some newspapers. "Come off it," he said.
He signalled a break with some of the party's policies, and distanced himself from former Prime Minister Gordon Brown's stewardship of the economy.
Brown, weakened by a banking meltdown and a deep recession, quit after Labour lost the May election.
"When you saw the worst financial crisis in a generation, I understand your anger that Labour hadn't stood up to the old ways in the City (financial district), which said deregulation was the answer," said Miliband, who was a confidant of Brown.
