With the Tory Party apparently in meltdown following Ian Duncan Smith’s resignation, it’s easy to miss how the events of the past few days affect Labour too. I’ve already blogged about how the terms of Duncan Smith’s resignation letter expose the cuts and austerity agenda as a matter of political choice, not economic necessity; the […]
Tag Archives: Ed Balls
Speaking at the Labour Party conference today, Shadow Transport Secretary Mary Creagh reiterated her support for the HS2 project. Economically, environmentally and politically, this is the wrong decision. The economic and political arguments against HS2 have been well-rehearsed – put simply, the claims made by its proponents do not stand up. Notoriously, its economic case […]
On the day of Ed Balls’ speech to the Labour Party conference – which included a ringing declaration of the need for fair deficit reduction – Chris Dillow raises some interesting points about fiscal credibility. He writes: At the end of an interview with Ed Balls this morning, Sarah Monague (02h 22min) gave us a wonderful […]
Ed Balls has caused something of a furore by claiming that, in contrast with bankers paying themselves bloated salaries, Wayne Rooney earns every penny of his £300,000 per week. It’s a claim that’s worth unpacking a little, because it tells us quite a lot about some of the assumptions we make about wealth, risk and […]
Ed Balls has today announced that Labour’s jobs guarantee scheme – likely to be a centrepiece of its programme at the next election – will be extended for the lifetime of the next Parliament if Labour wins the election. It’s hugely important that Labour gets this right. As a society and an economy we continue […]
There have in the last few weeks been a number of key announcements from senior Labour figures about policy, and they are beginning to conform to a well-established pattern. Controversial policy lines begin to appear in the media a few days before the speech, leading to furious cries of “sell-out” on the left, and then […]
The Labour Party has today announced a zero-based review of public spending, to be completed early in the next Parliament. It’s being presented in some circles as a renewal of the commitment to stick to something close to austerity after the election – which in some senses it is; in others it has been presented […]
Speaking on the BBC’s Marr show, Ed Balls expressed an ambition to run a budget surplus during the next Parliament. I didn’t see the programme and I’m relying on reports from other media, but by all accounts Andrew Marr didn’t ask the obvious question: why? The question matters because Balls was sitting alongside George Osborne, […]
There is a cynical view that party conferences are so much hot air – three weeks in which the party faithful essentially look inwards, with little that is relevant to the need of the wider world. That may be true at times, but this years conference season – and the events that have immediately followed […]
George Osborne’s Conservative party conference speech was dull – empty rhetoric around proposals that had largely already been announced. But there was one proposal that, if enacted, would be absolutely devastating. In the speech, Osborne made a commitment to run a budget surplus by the middle of the next Parliament, i.e. 2017-8, with no sign […]
Notes from a Broken Society 