Why Ed Balls is deceiving us about his plans, and the 50p tax

Now and again, you have to ask: why did Gordon Brown get away with that massive government overspending that bequeathed such a calamitous deficit? The answer is that he dressed up his profligacy with technical-sounding language, and fooled everyone. Ed Balls thinks he can fool us again. He has told the Fabian Society today that he’d balance the ‘current’ budget – but that’s only one part of government spending. (Investment is the other part, and he’d happily borrow for this.) But this caveat doesn’t appear to have been explained to those reporting on his speech, and today’s news reports wrongly declare that Balls would balance the books overall. (Only George Osborne has made this commitment.) So Balls gets the headlines, without having to make the commitment. Result!

But on one issue, he has been honest: he’d restore the top rate of income tax to 52 per cent. And why? Because it plays to Ed Miliband’s self-defeating and vindictive class war agenda.