Miliband's Balls dillema

Liz Brown

As dear old balls would himself say "so what"
They are all pathetic self servers

Woody

Ed Balls shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the Shad Chancellor's job. He wants it because of pure 'machismo' reasons and he's still Gordon Brown's man. This would be the ultimate revenge by Brown and his gang of thugs.

TrevorsDen

He should put Balls in charge of paper clips.
Balls offers nothing but dissent and scheming. And bad advice. Cooper is a walking disaster.

D Milliband was a pretty poor standard bearer of sanity but he was the only one. With him gone Labour look useless. New labour is dead. The work of 30 years thrown in the bin.

Beyond all this of course is the shadow of Brown - does he still think he can pull the strings; or is he as big an unperson as Blair these days?

Mycroft

It is actually quite difficult to know whether or not Labour's prospects would be advanced by having Balls as shadow Chancellor. He is a highly effective debater and is capable of making an essentially dishonest case sound quite credible; on the other hand, he is a charmless bully and pretty repulsive individual, which would put many people off.

Yam Yam

Didn't Lyndon Johnson have an analogy for this kind of dilemma that involved tents and urination?

Sir Graphus

The best suggestion (made by the Speccie), was to put Balls in at the Home Office.

Richard of York

For months Speccies have been saying he is useless and a lunatic.
So why do you not want him as shad chancellor? Why if he is such a liability are you so worried?
Why do you feel the need to shout all he says and crowd out his message?

Simple answer....your are scared to death of him and know exactly what he will do to Oik and Cameron over the despatch box.

If it was Andy Burnham or Diane Abbott you would be telling Ed Mili to go for it.
The typical response of all Tories is the smear and jeer those you fear....always has been always will be.
Happy Days.

David Booth

Ed Balls is a schemer and malcontent and where ever he ends up he will plot and undermine all around him.
The man is a toxic clone of his puppet-master Brown.
The worst I could wish upon Balls is for him to spend more time with that wife of his!

Roger Davies

Red Ed and Idiot Balls, Lucky Cameron as he will hang the mess we are in around their necks for years, probably decades. If this is the best of Labour then God help them and us if these morons are ever returned to Office.

Chris lancashire

Ed Miiliband and Ed Balls are the Conservatives dream ticket. However, overriding that is the fact that Balls is such an unpleasant liar, that useful as he is to the Coalition cause, most CHers want the man removed from mainstream politics.

toco

Balls' close association with the Smeargate trio of Damian McBride,Dolly Draper and Charlie Whelan make it very tricky for him to gain advancement in this way but this odious man's appointment would be an excellent result for the Conservatives and the LibDems.Here's hoping!!!

tb

Balls the architect of Brownonomics at the top of his CV won't go down to well with Ed 'BrownsAnIdiot' Milliband.

Either way it's a win for the other parties. If he's chancellor he'll rant on about how printing money and spending your way out of a deficit is the way forward. A theory that everybody except the terminally deluded of the far left realise is the way to economic ruin.

If he's passed over it'll be like the final years of Blair as his insidiousness ways crack open those weeping sores the Labourati keep trying to say are healed....

Time to sit back and put your feet up and wait for the popcorn.

david morris

Don't understand why the Speccie is not at the forefront/suggesting that Brown (Gordon) be brought
to book by the country for his flagrant mis-management of the finances of UK PLC.

Iceland appear to be going down this road.

Sir Graphus

I think, Richard, that we don't want him as Shadow Chancellor because when he was Brown's right hand man he bankrupted the country, and is wholly unrepentant about it.

lescam

"Beyond all this of course is the shadow of Brown - does he still think he can pull the strings; or is he as big an unperson as Blair these days?"

Wouldn't altogether surprise me if Gordon Brown was brought back as shadow chancellor. Cooper could then be shadow chief secretary, and Balls home secretary. All nice and neat and tidy. Brown would be in his element, doing what he loves best, wrecking the economy.

Start praying Labour never get into power again.

Richard of York

@Sir Graphus

Well if true and you are right that the whole country can see it and would reject it then why worry?
If you were in a race to get the last ticket for your fav band at the box office and a rival asked you for directions to said box office would you give them the right directions or would you seek to gain an advantage by sending them the long way round?
So if you have no fear then why the insults?

Sir Graphus

I didn't quite get the bit about the tickets and the band, but I don't believe I've insulted you or Ed Balls.

I happen to believe the Ed Milliband will be PM soonish, and that Ed Balls is a brilliantly effective opposition politician. This is why he's scary; he is not competent to run an economy; he's done it once before and ruined it. He doesn't understand how it happened, but is scarily sure it wasn't his fault and a full scale real time demonstration that his policies are wrong has not dented his conviction 1 bit. That's why I fear him.

RL54

"Put Balls in the Home Office"???
Behind bars would be more appropriate

Holly ......

So many top bods & big beasts to chose from in the Labour party eh.
Oh sorry...New Generation Labour party!
Well.....you have to laugh.
I haven't seen anyone 'new' or younger than
my nan(she's been dead since 1967 as well).
Kinnock & Livingstone?
Put Coop in charge of schools,she must know how to deal with the childish,being married to Balls.
Let Balls be foreign secratary & ship him out on 'fact finding missions' to Iraq.
Set up a new dept of 'Beauty & Health'for
Burnham and just reject Byrne as an idiot. Shadow cabinet sorted.
All in all another good day.
-END OF DAY FOUR-

Holly ......

The reason we fear Balls is because he's a swivel eyed lunatic,NOT because of any great
talent,of which he has none.
If he was sooooooooo great why are Labour in opposition?
Oh yeah...smarter cleverer,more level headed
bods booted him & Bozo out!
He will continue to be a swivel eyed lunatic
and we will continue clearing up the utter disaster he left behind.
Balls is nothing to be fearful of.
Oik as you call him WILL run rings around him just by using three things....
1.ENGLISH
2.BRAINS
3.COMMON SENSE.
These things are ALWAYS lacking in swivel eyed lunatics and can NEVER be gained,
because the more they try to gain them the more swivel eyed they become....
Remember Bozo?
Happy days indeed Richard...
Sadly not for swivel eyed lunatics or New Generation Labour parties.

Simon Stephenson

Richard of York : 3.32

"So why do you not want him [Balls] as shad chancellor? Simple answer....your are scared to death of him"

A simple answer from a simple mind.

The more cerebral answer is that the coalition is confident enough of the correctness of its policies that it fears no one with honesty who takes up the challenge of opposition advocate. On the contrary, it looks forward to being kept on its toes by a sharp intellect looking for holes in every argument it puts forward. This would be constructive politics - what its supposed to be all about.

Balls, on the other hand, although possibly possessed of a sharp intellect (possibly!) chooses instead to seek to discredit policy by lying and misrepresentation. This isn't constructive in any way. All it's doing is seeking to win by cheating. Very modern, but actually one of the more useless developments of the last 20 - 30 years.

Simon Stephenson

I thought someone else would have asked this by now, but what's a dillema?

Simon Stephenson

Holly : 7.05pm

Nicely put.

Simon Stephenson

"After one of the many sections in Ed Balls’ speech on the economy, there was a telling moment as Ed Miliband clapped half-heartedly with a thoughtful look on his face. One could almost see him trying to work out with whether he agreed enough with what Balls was saying to make him shadow Chancellor."

More likely he was thinking whether this pack of lies and deceits would tactically be better delivered by someone else. Balls has been doing this sort of thing for some time now, and if he said that Wednesday follows Tuesday half the population would immediately check their diary .(H/T Sir John Major). So Miliband may have been thinking that it could be better to have fresh faces telling the lies, because for a time, at least, more people are likely to believe them.

Poor old Balls might have to put up with being shunted off into some backwater, or encouraged to "move on" to another area of the politicosphere to collect the ample amounts of danegeld that will have been ferreted away for him during the time he's been preventing a proper political apparatus from functioning at Westminster.