Ed Balls commits to return of 50p rate

The overnight briefing of Ed Balls’ speech to the Fabian Society’s annual conference was that the Shadow Chancellor would make a binding fiscal commitment to balance the books, deliver a surplus on the current budget and get the national debt falling in the next Parliament. Which sounded like a mighty eleventh-hour repentance until you looked at the detail. Ed Miliband has spent the past few months trying to sound like a dry old bean counter by saying Labour wouldn’t borrow more for day-to-day spending, which really means Labour won’t borrow any more for revenue spending but can splurge all it likes on capital expenditure. And so Ed Balls has done the same today: the ‘surplus on the current budget’ is the same as ‘day-to-day spending’: it’s the revenue, not the capital budget. Labour has finally worked out how to have its debate about good and bad borrowing, which is by telling anyone half-listening that they won’t borrow more, and then hope that they won’t ask whether that applies to both revenue and capital spending.