Tagged with Ed Balls

A tale of two Labour coups

Murphy, Alexanderand MilibandToday’s Times (£) reports last night’s reshuffle as having been to prevent a coup (later clarified to say a “backbench coup“). The BBC are trying to give the story legs. There certainly was concern about the possible actions of two right-wing backbenchers to further undermine Ed Miliband’s leadership, and the reshuffle was designed to strengthen the small band of those personally loyal to Ed within the shadow cabinet, but that isn’t the internal threat that Ed really needs to worry about.

There are in fact two coups that should worry him and party members. They are both the work of shifting alliances of leading but disloyal members of his shadow cabinet. Continue reading →

Investment, jobs, growth must be Labour’s policy, not austerity

Miliband Hope imageLabour has had a successful party conference, Ed Miliband made a powerful speech with a strong commanding narrative of Labour’s objectives for government, but the only let-down was in the crucial area of economic policy.

Ed Balls’ embrace of the the right-wing Tory orthodoxy of prolonged austerity until at least 2020 is as unbelievable as it is indefensible. He clearly must believe that the voters don’t trust Labour because it’s profligate so we must at all costs prove to the electorate that we’re fiscally sound and hence be at least as tough as Osborne in pursuing austerity to cut the deficit. But the record shows that Labour has not been reckless with public expenditure.

The last Labour Government’s biggest deficit in the pre-crash years was 3% of GDP, yet the Thatcher-Major governments ran deficits bigger than this in 10 or their 18 years. So who was the more profligate? But anyway from my personal experience what disgruntled voters complain about isn’t that Labour is profligate, but rather: why should I vote for Labour when it’s no different from the Tories in pursuing endless spending cuts? – exactly what Ed Balls is committing to. Continue reading →

Balls is wrong. Austerity max is a recipe for defeat

ed balls 04Tony Blair was elected by offering new hope in 1997 after the ravages of Thatcherism. New Labour squandered that victory. Five million votes were lost between 1997 and 2010 by taking our core voters for granted. Since then working class voters have defected in droves to UKIP.  And most recently, in Scotland, to “Yes” and the SNP.

Ed Balls seems determined that trend will continue. What with benefit caps, pay freezes and sticing to a Tory budget, Austerity lite was bad enough, but at least investment spending provided some wiggle room. As Mark Ferguson puts it at LabourList:

the only reason for stomaching the adoption of Tory spending plans was the understanding – or at least, the hope – that Balls would use borrowing in capital investment projects to boost growth. Building schools, homes, road and railways costs money, but it also has a significant growth multiplier that means every pound borrowed and spent repays itself many times over – an economic dividend that a Labour government and the British people could reap at a time of hardship.

Now, a commitment to no new spending funded by borrowing takes austerity to Tory levels. Investment for growth has been sacrificed to make up for Balls’s own complicity in the errors of New Labour. Marg Ferguson says it’s a vision without hope. It is a disastrous error.  Continue reading →

Ed Balls and “ideology”

Ed-Balls-008Our politicians regularly try to convince us that they are just practical people interested in what works and not beholden to any theory. The idea that reality can be directly perceived just as it is, without recourse to any system of ideas, is idiotic. Making this claim is not an attractive trait. It means that the politician making it is either stupid enough to believe it, or that it is designed to make political gain on the basis of assumed general ignorance.

It might be claimed that we can tell whether car or a television is better than another without any theoretical insight just by observing performance. But on what basis would we do this? It could be on the basis of speed, acceleration, fuel efficiency, environmental pollution, build quality, price and availability of spare parts, reputation of the car company and a host of other factors. None of these are issues of direct perception. Most of them require measurement with special techniques or checking of past records. These ideas, unlike those of political philosophy, are generally understood but they are none the less ideas with a basis in theory and not perceptions. Continue reading →

Lobby your MP to join Labour rebellion against social security cap

pictures of all 6 potential Labour Leadership candidatesThe New Statesman report today that Labour MPs including Diane Abbott, Ian Lavery and John McDonnell are planning to vote against capping benefit, when a vote on this issue takes place this Wednesday, “with more to follow”. Abbott told the Statesman that the benefit cap was “part of a political narrative which demonises welfare claimants; most of the public don’t understand that half of welfare claimants are pensioners and that another quarter are in work.”

Ed Balls shocked many in announcing that Labour would not oppose the cap, and, it seems, has no qualms with it at all: “Ed Miliband called for a welfare cap last year, in his speech in June, and we have agreed with the way in which the government has structured the welfare cap, what’s in and what’s out in the next parliament.” Worryingly, George Osborne’s office are already crowing that Balls’s announcement means that Labour has signed up to the Tories’ “updated fiscal mandate”. Continue reading →