Ed balls

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

The Lib Dems could go from being the ‘nice party’ to the ‘nasty party’

Danny Alexander managed to please Ed Balls at Treasury Questions today by revealing that he wasn’t opposed to the Shadow Chancellor’s call for the Office for Budget Responsibility to audit the spending pledges made in an opposition party’s manifesto. He told the Commons: ‘I think this is an idea well worth further consideration, Mr Speaker. What I’d be worried about in taking it forward is the pressure it would place on the Office for Budget Responsibility, which is a new organisation that’s only recently taken on responsibility for forecasting the public finances. I’d worry that in the first election when they have those responsibilities this function might be difficult for

Monday

Steerpike

Coffee Shots: Labour gets tough

Labour says it is tough on welfare policy. And today, the party launched its tough compulsory jobs guarantee funding pledge by looking tough too. Ed Balls, Ed Miliband and Rachel Reeves would have made a stronger Mr Steerpike quail in these hard-hitting outfits.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Will HS2 become an election issue?

In an interview with The Spectator this week, the Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin admits that HS2 will not have been approved by parliament before the next election. This invites the question, will HS2 become an election issue? Both Ed Balls and Andy Burnham have made forays against HS2 in recent months. But both have been slapped down by Ed Miliband’s office. His allies believe that Labour can’t run on a platform of rebuilding Britain while simultaneously promising to put a stop to the biggest infrastructure project in decades. But one wonders if this Labour position will hold. The Tory election campaign will claim repeatedly that Labour’s sums don’t add up,

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

The Coalition mating game

There are ornately-feathered birds in New Guinea that have less bizarre mating rituals than Labour and the Lib Dems. The two parties need to show that it isn’t impossible to work with one another in a future coalition while also keeping their own supporters reassured that they’re not desperately keen to jump into a bed with another party that activists find themselves embroiled in dirty by-election and local fights with. Hence the weird back-and-forth dances and plenty of displays of aggression that we’ve seen over the past couple of months. So Ed Balls in January suggested Nick Clegg’s head would not be the price of a Coalition after all with

Friday

Alistair Darling

What is Alex Salmond’s plan for the currency now?

Alex Salmond is now a man without a plan. He is offering Scots a future of uncertainty and instability. Threats of a debt default leaving Scotland and Scots with a bad credit rating. No idea which currency we would be transitioning to. By contrast if Scots want to know the benefit of remaining in the UK, they need only reach into their pockets and pull out a pound coin. We have one of the most trusted, secure currencies in the world. We have the financial back up of being part of one of the biggest economies in the world. The pound means more jobs, smaller mortgage repayments, cheaper credit card

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes: Quangos – a world of perfect hypocrisy

The accusation that the Tories have been installing their people in public appointments should evoke only a hollow laugh. They have been comatose on the subject. One of the greatest skills of New Labour was putting its allies in positions of control across the public sector. A great many are still there, and yet the Tories wonder why their efforts at reform are frustrated. Maggie Atkinson, for example, was imposed by Ed Balls, when in office, as Children’s Commissioner, against the recommendation of the relevant selection committee. She lingers on in her useless post. Lord Smith, the former Labour cabinet minister who has been flooding the Somerset levels, is still

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Tories haven’t been installing their people in quangos – but they should have

The accusation that the Tories have been installing their people in public appointments should evoke only a hollow laugh. They have been comatose on the subject. One of the greatest skills of New Labour was putting its allies in positions of control across the public sector. A great many are still there, and yet the Tories wonder why their efforts at reform are frustrated. Maggie Atkinson, for example, was imposed by Ed Balls, when in office, as Children’s Commissioner, against the recommendation of the relevant selection committee. She lingers on in her useless post. Lord Smith, the former Labour cabinet minister who has been flooding the Somerset levels, is still

Monday

Sebastian Payne

David Higgins warns politicians of the costs of dithering on HS2

Sir David Higgins is making the most of the first few weeks in his job as chief of HS2 Ltd to fight the new line’s corner. In an interview in today’s Daily Telegraph, Higgins makes a strong case (arguably better than anyone from the government) for the line, explaining why there is no alternative. He warns that the existing rail lines risk becoming similar to the ‘Piccadilly line at rush hour’: ‘There are no new train paths. We’d love to put more trains on the west coast. It performs at 85 per cent. It’s a very tired, old, smartly refurbished railway line that is right at capacity. It’s the busiest

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why Ed Balls doesn’t care about criticisms of his tax plan

There were a million people who voted Labour in the 2005 general election but not in 2010, when the party fell from a 66 majority to 48 seats behind the Tories. Thanks to the Lib Dems’ spiteful rejection of boundary changes that would have helped their coalition partners, the 2015 poll is already rigged in Labour’s favour by about 30 seats, so the number of floaters who have to be won over to give Miliband and Balls a working majority is likely to be well down in six digits rather than seven. No doubt Labour’s pollsters know how many to the nearest thousand, and have them segmented and profiled to

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 30 January 2014

Home Britain’s gross domestic product grew by 1.9 per cent last year, the most since 2007, according to the Office for National Statistics. The last quarter’s growth was 0.7 per cent, a little less than the 0.8 per cent of the previous quarter. In the fourth quarter of 2013, construction actually declined by 0.3 per cent, and economic output was still 1.3 per cent less than in the first quarter of 2008. Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, promised in a speech that Labour would restore the 50 per cent rate of tax on higher earnings. Daniel Evans, a former Sunday Mirror journalist, told the Old Bailey that he had intercepted voicemails

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Ed Balls’s secret: he doesn’t care whether his tax plan makes sense

There were a million people who voted Labour in the 2005 general election but not in 2010, when the party fell from a 66 majority to 48 seats behind the Tories. Thanks to the Lib Dems’ spiteful rejection of boundary changes that would have helped their coalition partners, the 2015 poll is already rigged in Labour’s favour by about 30 seats, so the number of floaters who have to be won over to give Miliband and Balls a working majority is likely to be well down in six digits rather than seven. No doubt Labour’s pollsters know how many to the nearest thousand, and have them segmented and profiled to

Tuesday

Steerpike

Coffee Shots: Leslie comforts Balls

Ed Balls had a tricky time at Treasury Questions today. But fortunately, it seems he had his colleague Chris Leslie watching his back. Or, more specifically, his backside. Mr Steerpike was intrigued to see that Leslie’s contribution during a particularly robust round of heckling was to pat the Shadow Chancellor on the bottom as he sat down.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

George Osborne: Labour is ‘anti-the British people’

Quite naturally, there were rather more Conservative than Labour MPs in the House of Commons for Treasury Questions this morning. And quite naturally, George Osborne and colleagues on the Treasury front bench spent most of the session goading their Labour opponents about this morning’s growth figures. Deputy Chief Whip Greg Hands and Ed Balls had a wonderful extended session of heckling one another across the Chamber as the exchanges went on, with Hands mocking Balls’ flatlining gesture. Other MPs, though, were kept waiting rather longer to do what they’d turned up to do: jeer the Shadow Chancellor when he eventually stood up. But when he eventually stood up, 50 minutes

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Today’s GDP figures are useful ammunition for the Conservatives

That the UK economy grew by 0.7 per cent in the final three months of 2013, leading to the fastest growth annually since the financial crisis, is obviously very good news for the Coalition. The quarter-by-quarter figures have zig-zagged, but the overall growth for 2013 is 1.9 per cent over the year, which is the most important figure. These GDP figures from the ONS, published this morning, enable David Cameron to say that this is further evidence of the Coalition’s ‘long-term economic plan’ succeeding, and use the new Tory buzzword,‘security’. And though the economy is still 1.3 per cent below its pre-recession peak (see the graph below), George Osborne can

Monday

Lara Prendergast

BuzzFeed does politics. Watch out, Westminster

It’s startling how few young people feel aligned to a particular newspaper. Gone is the idea of ‘taking a paper’. Today, we are far more likely to use Flipboard to browse stories from hundreds of different newswires, blogs and websites. We turn to Twitter to see what people are saying about the day’s news, before logging into Facebook to share commentary on it. We care about what our friends are reading, and what the people we respect are reading. We couldn’t care less about loyalty to a publication. The explanation for this lack of loyalty is two-fold. There is plenty to suggest that the young feel abandoned by traditional news

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Labour and the Conservatives are both wrong about income tax

Never interrupt your opponent when he is making a mistake. On the other hand, when your opponent has made a mistake try not to match him by making an equal blunder of your own. That’s not how Westminster politics works, of course. For reasons that presumably make sense to the respective parties, Labour and the Conservatives have each managed to cock-up their tax policies. Specifically, they are both wrong on the politics of the 50% rate of income tax. That is, the Tories should never have cut the rate of tax paid by those few Britons earning over £150,000 and Labour should not be promising to restore the 50% rate.

Nick De Bois

How the Conservatives should respond to Ed Balls’ 50p tax pledge

This weekend Ed Balls made it clear he wants to tax Britain more.It won’t stop at 50%, and it wont be confined to the highest earners over 150,000. In that sense low tax Comservatives have much to thank Ed Balls for as he really has set out clear blue water between Labour and the Conservatives for the next election. Nevertheless, let’s not celebrate too quickly. Labour will know, and as Ed Balls all but acknowledged on the Marr show this weekend, that this tax commitment is little to do with economic policy and more to do with their own electoral strategy. A 50% top rate of income tax will raise

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

Ed Balls: Labour’s public spending was not a problem before the crisis

Ed Balls and Ed Miliband have a funny old approach to convincing voters that they should be handed back the keys to the car. They pen pieces about how tough Labour is on welfare spending and make careful (and carefully-worded) references at every opportunity to their promise not to borrow more for day-to-day spending. The Shadow Chancellor prevaricates over HS2 to give the impression that he’s fiscally responsible. He did that again today when he appeared on the Andrew Marr Show, but he also said this: ‘But do I think the level of public spending going into the crisis was a problem for Britain? No, I don’t, nor our deficit,

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

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

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

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