Skip to main content

Ed Balls remembered

The Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Rt Hon. Edward "Ed" Balls is a strange man. He, it is said, cries during Antiques Roadshow. Perhaps he should be more upset when he contemplates the political and economic legacy that Labour has bequeathed to the nation. Despite this slightly bizarre tendency towards the lachrymose, his reputation is uncompromising, even brutal.


Not just his reputation.


His latest journey into folie de grandeur is his invitation to Liberal Democrats- without, of course, their leader, Nick Clegg- to leave the coalition and join with Labour. 


This would be the same Ed Balls who dismissed the Liberal Democrat negotiation team in 2010 with words of one syllable. 


I think the response of the Liberal Democrats to his- hardly self-interested- invitation will be more or less the same words that he gave to David Laws in May 2010.


Just so all Labourites know, it was Ed Balls who told the Liberal Democrats that they should support a coalition with the Conservatives. It was Ed Balls who told us that there was no way that Labour would or could work with the Liberal Democrats in the national interest. It was Ed Balls who ensured that Labour would go into opposition.


As far as the Liberal Democrats are concerned, Ed Balls should stay in opposition indefinitely. 



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop

Media misdirection

In the small print of the UK budget we find that the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the British Finance Minister) has allocated a further 15 billion Pounds to the funding for the UK track and trace system. This means that the cost of the UK´s track and trace system is now 37 billion Pounds.  That is approximately €43 billion or US$51 billion, which is to say that it is amount of money greater than the national GDP of over 110 countries, or if you prefer, it is roughly the same number as the combined GDP of the 34 smallest economies of the planet.  As at December 2020, 70% of the contracts for the track and trace system were awarded by the Conservative government without a competitive tender being made . The program is overseen by Dido Harding , who is not only a Conservative Life Peer, but the wife of a Conservative MP, John Penrose, and a contemporary of David Cameron and Boris Johnson at Oxford. Many of these untendered contracts have been given to companies that seem to have no notewo

KamiKwasi brings an end to the illusion of Tory economic competence

After a long time, Politics seems to be getting interesting again, so I thought it might be time to restart my blog. With regard to this weeks mini budget, as with all budgets, there are two aspects: the economic and the political. The economic rationale for this package is questionable at best. The problems of the UK economy are structural. Productivity and investment are weak, infrastructure is under-invested and decaying. Small businesses are going to the wall and despite entrepreneurship being relatively strong in Britain, self-employment is increasingly unattractive. Red tape since Brexit has led to a significant fall in exports and the damage has been disproportionately on small businesses. Literally none of these problems are being addressed by this package. Even if the package were to stimulate some kind of short term consumption-led growth boom, this is unlikely to be sustainable, not least because what is being added on the fiscal side will be need to be offset, to a great de