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. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Waiting for the Barbarians

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum? The barbarians are due here today. Why isn’t anything going on in the senate? Why are the senators sitting there without legislating? Because the barbarians are coming today. What’s the point of senators making laws now? Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating. Why did our emperor get up so early, and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate, in state, wearing the crown? Because the barbarians are coming today and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader. He’s even got a scroll to give him, loaded with titles, with imposing names. Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas? Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts, rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds? Why are they carrying elegant canes beautifully worked in silver and gold? Because the barbarians are coming today and things like that dazzle the barbarians. Why don’t our distingui...
Post a Comment
Read more

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...
20 comments
Read more

Lib Dem v. Tory (Round 2)

The Liberal Democrats stand for a distinct political ideology. It is an ideology built around both socially and economically liberal precepts. In as far as our ruling Labour government can be said to have an ideology at all, it coincides with Liberalism only incidentally. Labour stands for pragmatism, and where it does not there is still a core of values that are collectivist and not individual. Sometimes people are prepared to claim the moral high ground for policies of social solidarity and redistribution of wealth. Liberals may argue in favour of equality of opportunity, we can not argue in favour- as Socialists do- of "and equal society". The reason is simple: Socialism does not work. If one places equality above freedom, then eventually we get tyranny. This is why, while we may argue in favour of a more equal society as being a stronger society, the tools that we may use to gain -in our view- socially desirable outcomes must rest upon freedom above all else. As PJ O'...
14 comments
Read more