ED Miliband has set out the first of five General Election pledges to cut the current budget deficit year on year until the books on it are balanced while securing the future of the NHS.

The party leader also made clear that none of Labour's manifesto commitments would require additional borrowing.

But he refused to give "an arbitrary date" by which the current deficit on day-to-day spending would be cleared except to promise it would be done as soon as possible in the next parliament, which ends in 2020.

Mr Miliband also gave himself some economic wriggle room by making clear that his pledge on borrowing applied to the current budget deficit and that borrowing for capital investment in infrastructure would be regarded differently.

Plus, on just where specific cuts would come, the Labour leader stressed this would be decided after May 7 when an in-coming Labour administration could look in detail at the Government books.

Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls has written to front-line colleagues to tell them to prepare for cuts in every Whitehall department each year until the current deficit is eliminated with exemptions only for the NHS, overseas aid and a "limited" number of other areas to be set out in the 2015 manifesto.

Having notoriously omitted to mention the deficit in his party conference speech, the Labour leader devoted his entire address in the City of London to it.

He declared: "There is not a path to growth and prosperity for working people which does not tackle the deficit."

Mr Miliband said he wanted a sensible and balanced approach to deficit reduction and contrasted this approach to the extreme, ideological one adopted by the Conservatives, who were bent on a "slash and burn" policy that would take spending on public services back to 1930s levels.

"This is now a fight for the soul of our country...about who we want to be and how we want to live together," he insisted.

Carl Emmerson of the respected think-tank, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said the speech delivered little additional detail about Labour's plans.

But he noted how the Labour leader had left himself "wriggle room" to borrow up to £50bn more than George Osborne in 2019/20, which would allow a virtual halt to spending cuts after 2016 but mean "much more borrowing and therefore government debt".

Last night, the Conservative Chancellor claimed Mr Miliband's plans would result in more borrowing, higher taxes and create "economic chaos".