We’ve already looked at the pre-election promises David Cameron made but failed to deliver after becoming Prime Minister.

Now it’s Labour’s turn, but since they lost the last election, they didn’t get the chance to break any promises.

What we can do is look at Labour’s predictions about the economy – many of which have failed to come true.

“We were also told that public sector job cuts would be more than outweighed by the rise in private sector jobs, but I am afraid that employment is falling because the private sector has been unable to deliver the recovery we were promised. It has been a complete fantasy.”
Ed Balls, 27 August 2010

Speaking just a few months after the last general election, Ed Balls was right at the time to say that employment was falling.

But in the long term, the coalition prophecy that “public sector job cuts would be more than outweighed by the rise in private sector jobs” has proved to be absolutely correct.

The latest jobs figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that there were more than 1.8 million more people in employment in the last quarter of 2014 than in the first quarter of 2010.

Some 73.2 per cent of the economically active population are in work now compared to 70.2 per cent at the time of the last election.

There is no doubt that this has happened because growth in private sector employment has more than made up for job losses in the public sector.

Since quarter 1 2010, employment in the public sector has fallen by more than 400,000 – but private sector employment has increased by around 2.1 million.

“As the impact of deflation on jobs and the economy feeds through over the coming months, and the reality of the Government’s cuts programme, tax rises and benefit cuts begins to bite, I have no doubt that public opinion will become increasingly concerned.”

In the same speech, Mr Balls suggested that public concern over the scale of cuts would inevitably rise as the austerity programme got into full swing.

Actually, this proved to be a miscalculation too.

Since 2010, pollsters YouGov have been asking people: “Thinking about the way the government is cutting spending to reduce the government’s deficit, do you think this is good or bad for the economy?”

In the last poll before Mr Balls made his speech in 2010, 44 per cent of people thought the cuts were good and 38 per cent thought they were bad.

In the very latest poll, carried out earlier this month, the numbers are exactly the same. Concern about the cuts hasn’t changed at all, and most people are still in favour of austerity.

Other YouGov polls show that fewer people now feel the cuts were too deep, were introduced too quickly, or are having an impact on their own lives, compared to 2011, when YouGov started asking these questions.

“Cuts… are choking off growth.”
Labour press release, 14 March 2011

It’s debatable whether the coalition’s economic policies “choked off” growth.

On the one hand, it’s true that the recovery has been slower than after previous downturns, and that it has taken Britain longer to emerge from recession than other advanced economies, as this ONS graph shows:

But Britain’s economy grew faster than any of the other G7 countries in 2014, according to the IMF.

“I actually said I thought it was most likely that there wouldn’t be a double-dip or triple-dip recession.”
Ed Balls, 6 January 2014

Mr Balls appeared to be trying to rewrite history somewhat in an interview with Sky News last year.

Its true that the shadow chancellor said, in November 2012: “I don’t think a triple-dip recession is the most likely outcome.”

But there is plenty of evidence of him predicting a double-dip – when GDP comes out of recession temporarily, only to slide back into negative growth for a second time.

He used the phrase four times in his Bloomberg speech, saying: “We are now seeing very real worry in financial markets as fears of stagnation or even a double-dip recession grow.”

When official statistics showed that the economy had slid back into the red at the beginning of 2012 Mr Balls made a string of speeches blaming the situation on coalition policy.

But in June 2013 the ONS issued revised growth estimates and said the double-dip never actually happened.