Archive for ed balls
Ed Balls: My starting point is we are going to have keep all the cuts
Saturday’s Guardian has an interview with Ed Balls: Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, has moved to challenge accusations that Labour is not credible on the economy by telling the public sector unions that he endorses George Osborne’s public sector pay freeze until the end of the parliament, and that he accepts every spending cut… “My [...]
Brown at 10: the authoritative account – which lays into Ed Balls
When it first came out Brown at 10 by Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge was extremely well received for its authoritative detail and the revised paperback edition maintains that standard well. With Seldon being one of the founders of the modern school of contemporary history, it is no surprise that the book follows the thorough, [...]
Ed Miliband certainly got one thing right in his reshuffle
Though others are viewing the demotion of Angela Eagle from Shadow Chief Secretary as a move by Ed Miliband to clip the wings of Ed Balls, it does mean Miliband has sacked from his Treasury team one of the Labour MPs with the most dramatically wrong track-records when it comes to economic predictions. Keeping her well away from [...]
Ed Balls has a new take on having your cake and eating it
There are two problems with a Liberal Democrat like myself blogging about Labour Party conference. First, as I’ve so often seen from the other side of the fence, an outside blogging about another party’s conference frequently misreads what is really happening. And second, no blogger can compete with Hopi Sen and his cat. So caveats [...]
Ed Miliband's photographic problem
The Guardian is (or should be) one of the most friendly newspapers towards Labour leader Ed Miliband, which makes their choice of photograph on this morning’s story about Labour’s tuition fees policy all the more revealing. Superficially the photograph is fine: it shows Ed Miliband, free of odd facial expression, at party conference. There’s a bottle of water [...]
Learning the lessons from last week #2: Lib Dem voters don’t want out of the coalition
Even after last Thursday, I’ve come across very few Liberal Democrats saying, “we should have made a deal with Labour last May”. That’s not a surprise, given the Parliamentary arithmetic and also all that has come out since about just how split Labour’s negotiating team was, not to mention the almost farcical lack of preparation [...]
Meet the Lib Dem bloggers: Nick Thornsby
Welcome to the latest in our series giving the human face behind some of the blogs you can find on the Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator. Today it is Nick Thornsby who blogs at http://nickthornsby.wordpress.com. 1. What’s your formative political memory? The 2005 election was the one I was probably first properly aware of as a [...]
Eight words from Ed Balls on the structural deficit
Ed Balls on whether there was a structural deficit under Labour:
“I don’t think so” (BBC interview, 30 January)
“Of course there was” (New Statesman interview, 31 March)
Economic statistic of the week: 0.3%
It’s been a common political refrain: Labour planned massive cuts in public spending, Labour lost the election and but then Labour campaign repeatedly against cuts without ever saying what it would have cut. We’ve never been told how Labour would have cut that £44 billion it was planning on. Nor have we heard why Labour [...]
Ed Balls and his praise for light-touch regulation in the City
As Caron Lindsay pointed out in her write-up of Nick Clegg’s interview with Andrew Marr yesterday morning, the question of Ed Balls’s record in government compared with Labour’s current policies is likely to become all the more pointed now that Balls is back in an economic role: There’s no sign of timidity in the Coalition [...]
