Archive for ed balls
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 [...]
Chris Huhne profiled by the Independent on Sunday
Today’s Independent on Sunday has a long profile of Chris Huhne and his work as a Cabinet minister and including some hints of criticism of Andy Coulson: The one time he appears to choose his words carefully is when discussing Andy Coulson. On a biting Friday morning, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate [...]
5 Days to Power: could there have been a Lab-Lib Dem deal?
Conservative MP Rob Wilson’s book on the formation of a coalition government in May 2010, 5 Days to Power: The Journey to Coalition Britain, plays up the drama of the events, talking of how “Gordon Brown and David Cameron were both determined to do whatever was necessary to secure the position of Prime Minister” as [...]
Just how bizarre will the Brown / Blair revelations get?
The more that comes out about how Tony Blair and Gordon Brown behaved (or perhaps more accurately, how Gordon Brown behaved towards Tony Blair) the more you wonder quite what world they were living in. Here, courtesy of The Guardian’s Nicholas Watt, is one of the latest revelations of the sort of behaviour that would [...]
Dear Ed Balls…
I see you’ve been speaking out today defending Labour’s record over the Vetting and Barring Scheme. So I hope you don’t mind me raising again my own experience of trying to raise concerns with the Labour government over one particular detail of the scheme it introduced. As I previsously wrote, I emailed Sir Roger Singleton [...]
Labour’s failure – and dilemma – in a sentence
This quote from Jon Cruddas beautifully sums up much of what went wrong with the Labour government – and the dilemma Labour faces working out what to do next:
I’ve known for David Miliband for twenty years, I’ve known Ed Balls for twenty years, but I don’t know what they stand for.
The Independent Safeguarding Authority: my letter to Ed Balls
Following my letter to Sir Roger Singleton about the ISA‘s apparent reluctance to believe that a jury may acquit because it is sure someone is innocent, I have also written to Ed Balls. This time it’s about the lopsided attitude to rethinking past decisions. Dear Secretary of State, I was glad to read that you [...]
How small could the Cabinet be?
It looks like Gordon Brown might be finding it a bit hard to persuade people to serve in the Cabinet. But good news for him, there’s plenty of historical precedent of small Cabinets. George Grenville in the mid-eighteenth century had a Cabinet of just nine, whilst the Fox-North coalition of the late eighteenth century managed [...]
