Ed Balls debuts the apprenticeships Brownie

Chuck Unsworth

Nice to see Balls keeping up the family traditions of lying and general mendacity. What I hadn't realised until recently that he's developed a new tradition - that of sheer stupidity. Maybe it's something which is contagious, after all Mrs Balls ain't too clever, either.

What the Tories should do is call him on this - make him provide evidence for these inane assertions.

But, as you observe, the voice of Balls is the sound of Brown's sphincter. It is noticeable that when Brown sits down Balls goes mute.

Trumpeter Lanfried

Actually, Labour banging on about 'Tory cuts' may not be a bad thing. A lot of voters, perhaps a majority, are now convinced that cuts are essential.

Of course Cameron's line is far too timid. Most Government Departments would function more efficiently if you cut their budget by 5%. Ask any civil servant (in the privacy of his own home, once he has had a couple of drinks).

Liz Brown

Does anyone actually listen to anything that the little shit "So what" Ballsup has to say? I am quite gleeful that I have managed to avoid seeing or listening to any of the lying bastards for the last week. The cold is quite bad enough without them coming into my space

Polly and Alice's mum

"No self respecting interviewer would let him get away with it..."
Which interviewer would that be? Seriously, can you think of ONE who doesn't let any representative of this mendacious government get away with their huge whoppers?
Come on, coffeehousers. Name one.

wight tory

Trumpeter Lanfried is right, lets face facts, it's the Tories who have history on their side (certainly over the last 50 years)that when in recession, they get re-eleected. In most cases, its the Labour party that cause them.

Or is just that they one's they create, are deeper, longer and create a sense of desperation for those that they proclaim to be on the side of.

The Isle of Wight has over 2100 people claiming JSA, look on the JS+ website for the IOW and see how many jobs are available, 13 a couple of days ago....and not an apprenticeship in sight

Colin

I would write that balls is a complete joke; if it wasn't for his role in creating the policies that have done so much economic damage over the past 11 years or so - there's nothing remotely funny about that.

That said, I'd be grateful if someone could point me in the direction of that laughable today program interview he gave prior to the 2005 election, that was funny.

sandy

"No self respecting interviewer would let him get away with it."

Well that's the BBC taken care of.

Hysteria

um - I agree that this sounds like mendacious labour at their worst - but I have a question...

so we are interviewing someone who comes up with a comment such as this. What is the interviewer to do? They can take it at face value and move on (CH would argue this is the BBC default position I guess)

or if they challenge, what would the challenge be? Show me the evidence? Prove it? Unless they have the facts at their finger tips to get into a substantive argument, I am not sure what the average hack could say that gets us to a better position .....

but I am sure you guys can come up with something I have missed ?

Juliana

You should hear what they say about Mrs Ballsup in her West Yorkshire constituency - they don`t mince their words up there.

Travis Bickle

Hysteria

Strangely BBC reporters interviewing Tory politicians always seem to find a way to challenge and question (oh and interrupt of course).

Peter F

Hysteria, a decent political interviewer should know whether or not the Conservatives have announced plans to scrap all apprenticeships. If they have not then they should call the Labour politician to account and ask on what basis they can claim that the Conservatives ARE planning such a thing. And when they make assumptions then they should insist that Labour are simply making assumptions about what another party are planning and are not stating fact. And if the Labour interviewee will not accept that they are only making assumptions then the interviewer should again state that according to all reasonable people it must be clear that they are indeed only making assumptions. It should not be hard.

Don

We are always told how clever this man is but I have to say he does a bloody good job of hiding it.

Charlie

it is time there was a national audit of government jobs- nlocal and national. We do not need the name of the person just the job title, salary, pension,cost of employment -office costs,length of holiday and any other benefit. The jobs should be divided into category. Only when people see all the non -jobs will they appreciate the vast numbers which could be cut from the government pay roll.

Hysteria

Travis/Peter - thanks - obvious really -

I guess the absence of that type of interviewer proves the point that the BBC (et al) are not free of bias.

The fourth estate being a fifth column - so to speak.

Roger

It would be quiet simple to reduce Public Spending by 5% PA in real terms over the next 5 years and improve the quality of output. Problem is that we do not have the quality of management or leadership in this sector to achieve this. They prefer the simple route of ever increasing budgets supporting a mountain of waste. Come on Cameron get your sleeves rolled up.

cuffleyburgers

They are smart enough to know that he BBC will not take them to task on this, and that their favoured part of the electorate lacks the attention span to pick up news from elsewhere.

It is obvious that no one on this thread with a few well known trolls excepted, is going to vote labour - the battle is, as we have said before, for a few hundred thousand votes in a few dozen constituencies. What labour have cynically done is to abandon policies that benefit the country as a whole, and to say whatever it takes, do whatever is required and above all, spend whatever seems likely to buy those few votes.

Mr Balls is an expert at this game. His famous So What comment exemplified that because he knew that the people who matter (ie their target 100,000) don't pay tax.

A 2009 election is looking more and more likely, and I agree with Boris, that it is likely to be June (after the global financial forum)

I reckon they will be calculating that just enough peoples mortgage payments will have come down and that this will mask the gradual lengthening of the dole queues, as Britain's few remaining lathe operators retrain as repo men...

John Moss

The scale of waste is endemic after 11 years of a Government whose focus was on dreaming up schemes to look good in the media - eye-catching initiatives, I think they were called - and then throwing our money at them. Once in the budget, that money is very, very hard to get back out again.

There should be a cash freeze of the total of Government spending for the next five years. That will give a 3-4%pa real terms reduction in spending overall, freeing up something like £18-£25 billion each year.

Using Brownian cumulative calculation, over five years that will add up to something like £150bn less public spending and if that were split 50/50 between debt reduction and tax cuts we would all be vastly better off.

Now, how you do it is a different question, but setting the goal and demanding that Secretaries of State and Ministers focus on getting the job done with the available resources is how real talent is identified and how the culture gets changed from, "What can we find to spend the money on", to "What do we need to do and how can we best deliver?"

John Page

The way to get a whopper out is for it not to be trailed in advance, so that the interviewer is caught off guard, thinking, "Will I be showing ignorance of a well-known fact if I challenge this".

One's left thinking how unpleasant these people are (not far) underneath.

Ivan Dunnow (Tory v bored of partisan hackwork)

This tedious, self-congratulatory silliness about 'Brownies' really is becoming a bit much. Let's try a 'Nelly', shall we? If we look back at what you said here about the German attacks upon Britain, how do they stand up now?

Julian

"Ask any civil servant in the privacy of his own home after a few drinks" - I think they call that a "work from home day"

Hysteria

in my company we are currently going through a period of serious reductions - to the point made by Roger 7:50, we are fortunate in having the strong management skills and sufficient ruthlessness to make it happen.

Budgets are actually cut (meaning reduced in real terms by 10% from last year) and this means real jobs will go - but we will be stronger for this approach.

Sadly, the Public Sector shows little ability for this kind of process.

Although a CH poster yesterday did mention that you can get rid of Civil Service jobs - so it gets back to the quality of the senior leaders - in this case the elected officials (central and local)

Sammy

Im afraid I think its the tories own fault, not the media.

They have announced multi-billion pound cuts but not said where. That leaves them open to this charge.

Its very easy for them to avoid - they just have to say where the cuts would come.

Simon Stephenson

In

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/charlesmoore/4210224/But-after-you-have-saved-the-world-Mr-Brown-what-then.html

Charles Moore makes what to my recollection is the first intimation in the mainstream media why Brown and his acolytes will cause difficulties that are unstoppable by normal political discourse.

Moore's point is made when he writes:-

" ... psychologically and ideologically, Mr Brown has great difficulty in seeing that government intervention – especially by a government run by him – could possibly be a bad thing."

The Brown Government is composed of people who are psychologically incapable of accepting that they are possessed of human mental fallibility. They are personally so fearful of the potential fragility of open-mindedness that they have corralled themselves within a basic belief system that holds as an article of faith that all contradictory ideas are inferior - without question.

As a result, seeking constructive intellectual engagement with people such as Brown, Balls, Mandelson, Campbell etc. is a completely futile exercise, because they are mentally incapable of risking their beliefs being exposed as having foundations of clay.