By Simon Heffer
Last updated at 9:10 AM on 27th September 2011
There was one profound difficulty with Ed Balls's plea at Labour's conference for his party to be trusted on the economy, and that was Ed Balls.
Although Labour deny it passionately, the economy is in a mess because of the policies they followed when in power before May 2010.
And one of the principal architects of those policies was Ed Balls.
There was one profound difficulty with Ed Balls's plea at Labour's conference... and that was him
It's all very well for him to say that they would behave in future.
It's all very well to talk about their obeying the diktats of the Office of Budget Responsibility, of not reversing all the Coalition's tax increases or all its spending cuts.
But one problem still remains, and that is Mr Balls himself.
Mr Balls was at Gordon Brown's right hand from the moment Mr Brown went into the Treasury on 2 May 1997.
He egged Mr Brown on in one disastrous policy shift after another for the decade that Mr Brown was Chancellor.
And when Mr Brown became Prime Minister, and inherited the whirlwind, Mr Balls was there by his side again, in the government, helping him to stay in denial.
Ever since Labour was engulfed in the economic crisis in 2008, its apologists have sought to argue that what went wrong in the world economy was the fault of global factors – notably a contagion shipped in from America – and Labour had little to apologise for.
At this conference, that line is subtly changing.
Having insulted the intelligence of the public, Labour now acknowledges that it made mistakes in office (not least with its economic management) and there is no point in continuing to make an argument about what happened that only a congenital idiot would believe.
The question Labour ought to be asking itself is this: how far can it hope to restore its credibility on economic questions when its main economic spokesman is someone so explicitly responsible for the mess we are in?
Even if one treats with scepticism (and I certainly do not) claims made in Anthony Seldon's revised biography of Gordon Brown, which claimed that Mr Balls 'sexed up' economic data when his party held power and in doing so kept the true scale of the economic catastrophe quiet, what is known and proved about Mr Balls's role in the Blair and Brown administrations is damaging enough to him.
One reason Mr Balls performed so poorly in last year's Labour leadership elections – coming a distant third behind both Miliband brothers – was his contamination because of his association with Mr Brown.
Even if the general public might not have entirely understood the relationship, those in the party did.
Mr Balls is a clever man, but he puts his considerable intelligence to uses that do not always further the truth.
He seems to have that old Stalinist trait, once so popular in his party, of arguing whatever serves the interests of the party, irrespective of where it sits with any principles he might have.
It took some gall on the part of the Shadow Chancellor – not that anyone has ever accused him of lacking that – to talk about the effect that the Coalition's policies were having on unemployment.
Anthony Seldon's revised biography of Gordon Brown, claims that Mr Balls 'sexed up' economic data when his party held power
Those policies are only necessary because of the legacy he and his puppet-master, Mr Brown, created.
It took even more brass neck for him to profess the need for 'discipline', when Labour's own conduct of the economy showed even less of that commodity than is to be found in a sink comprehensive school.
For too much of his speech Mr Balls sounded like his mentor, speaking in those monotonous torrents of clauses whos rhetorical force is designed to obscure their fundamental lack of meaning.
But then as Mr Balls used to help write Mr Brown's speeches, we shouldn't be surprised.
Mr Balls's attack on the support for austerity given by the government, and by the Republican right in America, was vacuous.
His critique is fundamentally flawed: spend more to get out of jail, even though spending so much has got us in jail already.
He was right to say that the austerity policy on its own isn't enough: but what he dares not advocate is the raft of tax cuts – funded by further spending cuts - that would be the ideal complement to what the Coalition is doing.
Labour Party shadow cabinet meeting in the House of Commons: they showed at inordinate length yesterday, they have nothing to offer at all
Mr Balls no doubt felt he was being magnanimous when he said that Messrs Cameron and Osborne hadn't caused the global crisis.
What he still failed to add was that while he didn't cause it either, its impact on Britain was all the worse because of the insane levels of debt that were racked up during the Brown-Balls era.
There were apologies in his speech: but they seemed mainly to be about not having spent enough public money.
His throwaway apology about bank regulation – another policy in which he was closely engaged as a Brown adviser – was not enough. It was the most catastrophic error, apart from letting off the brakes on spending, that the last government perpetrated.
He created a diversion by accusing the present government of making mistakes: but these 'mistakes' were simply the Coalition's spending cuts, all of which were necessitated by the insane binge of the Brown-Balls years.
Mr Balls had nothing to offer yesterday, except the same old socialist, high-spending, redistributive rubbish.
Why would you trust him? Why would you buy a used economy from such a man?
He showed himself bankrupt of ideas, and good sense, when he had a hand on the levers of power.
His five point plan, outlined in his speech, was simply the same old formula of spending more public money.
His plan for 'jobs and growth' smells like a small version of Barack Obama's $787bn fiscal stimulus of two years ago: from which there has been absolutely no net creation of jobs, and hardly any growth.
It hasn't worked in the past, and it won't work now.
Even if Mr Balls had anything to offer, he wouldn't be worthy of our trust, given his appalling record of misjudgements.
But, as he showed at inordinate length yesterday, he has nothing to offer at all.
I would like journalists and politicians to stop using the phrase 'government spending'. During a trip in the US I noticed signs saying 'Your tax dollars are funding' this or that project. In Europe there are signs about the EU funding projects. Why do we have so many politicians compared to other countries? France has 100 deputies for the same population. Should they be paid the average wage of the country? Should lawyers (most of them seem to be) be allowed to produce more and more laws, a conflict of interests surely. Was it not a human rights lawyer who persuaded her husband to sign up to the act? Finally, how about banning the route university, party research department, safe seat, minister. How many would be left? Perhaps they would be less likely to use other peoples money for their own purposes if they had earned some in useful employment themselves.
- Simon Allnutt, Evenos, France, 27/9/2011 15:50
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