The Tories waste no time in getting stuck into Balls

daniel maris

Two Eds are better than one when it comes to the economy.

Frank P

Well he's certainly not shaping up to cup Mrs Ball's bumpers with that gesture in the depiction above: two fingers of each hand would be ample. In fact a tweak from each index finger would more than suffice. So who is about to receive his attentions? I think we should be told.

John Goode

Well he may have failed the country by his part in the policies that allowed the credit boom and the housing bublle but Ed Balls and certainly benefited personally out of it. See

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5325590/Ed-Balls-and-Yvette-Cooper-flipped-homes-three-times-MPs-expenses.html

Balls by name balls by nature

Rhoda Klapp

Daniel Maris makes a pun on his name, and chooses to make his play on Ed. What restraint, more than the Spec's sub-eds can manage.

Victor Southern

The photo does not show a pair of safe hands. Poor Ed Miliband now has both MacBeths zeroing in on him.

Sam Davidson

The apparently minuscule pool of "talent" which the opposition have to call upon should be a boon for the coalitionl

TrevorsDen

Ed Balls -

'Brain the size of a meteorite'

'Ego the size of a planet'

charles hercock

But balls is a rottweiller star. The coalition with rue the day they cut so much

Dimoto

Red as leader, Balls as shadow Chancellor, wee Dougie Foreign, Mrs Balls at Home, Byrne at W&P - looks like a 5 card trick of hardline Brownites.

A Brownite putsch.

charles hercock

Interesting that the greater intellect Yvette is left trailing around the shadow cabinet after her husband. She and hubby however are well placed to ditch lightweight Ed

GDT

Plus he only has a majority of 100. Perfect for a decapitation strategy...

toco

In addition to financial incompetence and unpleasantness Blinker Balls' oh so close association with the Smeargate trio of Damian McBride,Dolly Draper and Charlie Whelan will give Red Ed cause to rue this appointment.

Fatbloke on tour

JF

Wishful thinking, EB will up the debate around the ConDem's "slashathon" by some considerable amount.

The whole situation suggests that Milli-E is a better political operator than anyone would ever give him credit for.

The TB / GB proxi battle on economics is now finished with no chance of any comeback or continued bickering.

AJ had his chance, no he goes.
EB gets involved to popular acclaim.
Consequently game on with dog boilers and Sniffy the FT reject.

AAE

I welcome Ball's appointment as would any proper Tory Chancellor interested in reversing years of socialist state-confiscation of both our money and our freedoms. But alas . . . . . . . .

daniel maris

Charles Hercock is right. The coalition have embarked on some crazy destabilising policies - pay freeze when there's 5% price inflation, savage cuts when the economy is so fragile, and ill thought through NHS reform. Not a good start at all.

AF

Trevers Den,
But balls like steamed clams.
At last a man in the firing line jointly responsible for the dire economic state this country is in.
It wont be easy to airbrush Labours finger prints from the mess they left.

David Ossitt

“One thing worth noting before we discuss Balls’ appointment is that the reasons Johnson have resigned are personal. It is not about his competence or otherwise.”

Pure unadulterated bbbbbbbbbbbulshit.

Tocqueville

@Charles Hercock

Charlie, I know things must be a bit panicked down at Labour spin HQ now that the political son of Gordon Bully-Boy Brown has returned to haunt the offices once again, but you could have come up with something better than the half baked drivel you posted here.

The coalition won't be rueing anything. In fact, they'll probably be quite happy to have the chief deficit denier trying to implement his own form of ballsnomics against Miliband Jr's stated policy. I mean you could have pick someone that might be able to come up with an at least half sensible economic policy, but instead you choose a guy who lives on another planet, and even went as far as to disagree openly with you when you were in power.

If anyone has any rueing to do, its Labour. You've just destroyed whatever thin shreds of economic credibility you had left.

DavidDP

Check out Guido. This isn't over.....

Alex Gallagher

fatblokeontour,

my thoughts exactly. The Blairites have been nuetered and the right man, Balls, is across the dispatch box from Georgey-Porgey.

Woody

It is alleged that Mr Ball's SPAD has dug the dirt on Alan Johnson and it will be in The Sunday Times.
What a dirty street fighter Ball's is but then you journalists admire him for it.
EdM has been well and truly stitched up by Gordon Brown and his plotters.

JohnPage

Michael Fallon was very good on Sky.

Why Warsi, then?

tb

Intriguing timing, Tories have had a pretty crap week with the sunday headlines all set about them and then Ed Balls lays the boot into Johnson...

Ed "The More You Borrow, The More You Save!" Balls...

TrevorsDen

So Balls has put his Sonderkommandos onto AJ's private life and spilled the beans. ?

This is got to be toxic for Labour.

Where is Iain Dale when you want him? Hopefully signing up AJ's dish the dirt memoires.

Verityred

The outed Fat Troll splutters from under Ed B's shadow. Cut and paste failure. Try harder dear.

Holly ......

Before the left explode with delight,let's just take a step back and look at what has happened here.
Ed Balls has got the shadow chancellors job.
Now I don't know what he or they think this means,but he will have no input to how the economy is run,& for a bod who is used to being in charge,implimenting stuff,spin,
cover up's & hiding behind others,to now having no say in the economy,or anything to do with it,makes his position rather pointless.
Calling Osborne a millionaire,Tory toff will
not cut it with the public,neither will saying there is no need to cut.
This is NOT the great outcome the leftie bods make it out to be.
Balls may be the 'attack dog',have more
'bite/teeth' than Johnson,but he has NO part
in economic policies being implimented,NO clout at the treasury and that will drive him nuts....Years of Balls being unable to impliment anything,is precisely what this country needs right now...He is exactly where the coalition wanted him...answering to the mess he made.
Balls,just like idiot boy have got nothing of any value or purpose.
Shafting Johnson may have seemed like a good idea at the time,but it will come back to bite him.
Watching this 'attack dog' being slowly put out of it's misery will indeed be interesting to watch,if only to see who he takes with him.
A brilliant case of the right bod,in the right job,at the right time.
He can now explain to the country how he helped wreck it.
Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
Osborne has the power he once had and Balls won't like that for long either.
All in all a fantastic day...

Fatbloke on tour

Cheap Slapper @ 9.42

Love the level of barbed insult you are throwing my way. You are GH of the dead sheep fame with tits but poorer manners.

Consequently away and bile yer heid ya minger.

Now onto things economic.
The second half of 2011 is starting to look a bit shaky economically as even the financially illiterate Trevor aka "Fraser" has admitted in an earlier post so things are going to get interesting.

As for all this nonsense about the deficit and what plans does Milli-E have to sort it out, it is just our dog boiling media stirring on behalf their pals in the Tory party.

We have a deficit of 11%.
We then have to work out the split between the cyclical and the structural elements.

The OBR and their comic 4% output gap suggest:

Cyclical = 2.3%
Structural = 8.8%

Funny that as the Treasury "estimates" on the deficit came down the structural element stayed the same as the OBR pauchled the figures on the output gap and from that the cyclical element of the deficit.

Cut the deficit in half in 4 years?
That means £78bill in 4 years.
Capital investment running at £51bill+
Squeeze on the welfare bill.
Make that 50% of the dog boiling cuts.
Add in some imagination over and above what a timid Auld Reekie lawyer was comfortable with.

Piece of pish if Sniffy had stuck to the plan.

Dog boiling slashathon?
Sniffy will reap what he has sown.
The question will be when will Speccyland realise they have backed a loser?

Be afraid, very afraid.

Holly ......

What brightens my day is..the likes of FBoT.
Todays Labour supporters,(many of them twittering the usual inane rubbish)are nothing like the Labour supporters of the past.
Many from working class backgrounds in the
'70s,recoil at the slime that try to pass
themselves off as the party of the worker.
As sure as night follows day...Miliband is
TOAST.
Balls will see to that.

TrevorsDen

Fatso says cut the deficit in half is easy. £78 billion. Easy.
Well Fatso is a lot cleverer than me - so we will gloss over the fact that that leaves 50% of the structural deficit (and the rest) still building up interest payments which take away available spending on us, so leaving more cuts necessary.

Last I read the govt planned to cut the deficit from 11-and-a-bit% to 4% by 2014-15. Like I said Fatso is a lot cleverer than me so I do not know if this is good or bad or indifferent - but its not that much more than half. And if half is 'easy', well a bit more cannot be too disastrous.

Hardly dog boiling. Just puppy eating.

Stewart

Johnson was as unqualified to be Shadow Chancellor as Margaret Beckett was to be Foreign Secretary or Des Browne was to be SoS for Defence. He was the latest in a line of supremely unsuitable MPs promoted beyond their ability to potentially endanger the people of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Balls will be more effective in the day to day political battle but will be constantly overshadowed by the blame he must shoulder for the economic and financial mess the country is now in.

The Laughing Cavalier

The moment I heard that Johnson had resigned I assumed that he had been shafted by the smirking Balls. Guido Fawkes confirms the story. Now we have brown's droogie just a short swing of the pendulum away from completing his mission to destroy the british economy.

Hugh Janus

Quite right Stewart, and Michael Fallon on Toady made a promising start in reminding us of Balls' crimes. The Conservatives must always preface any comments about this odious and highly incompetent individual with a lengthy reminder as to who was mostly responsible for the economic shambles that we are all having to pay so dearly to clear away. One day even Liebour voters might wake up to the reason why the tax they are paying is going through the roof. When the Conservatives finally get everyone to see the connection, they will be making real progress against the repellant Balls and his insufferable party.

michael

If F bot's deficate is andrexed to 4% of his whole stinking pile he can forget all those dog eating banquets with his commy mates...

Whilst the cesspit he has bequeathed us will still be fouling up at a his fag packet rate of 70 bil(ugh) that will ALL be down to
paying his banker chums contracts and their written in stone bonuses...the electorate will smell the stench a mile off.

Fatbloke on tour

Failed Blogger @ 11.53

At some point you are going to understand the basic economics behind the state of the governments finances and when you do you will realise that AD / GB had a plan and Dave the Rave and Sniffy do not have a clue.

The deficit has been split into two elements, cyclical due to the Credit Crunch and structural down to issues and imbalances within the economy after thye economic shock has changed or removed some elements.

2009/2010: Deficit = £156bill / 11.1%'ish.
The OBR / Three Brothers Grimm calculated the cyclical element to be 2.3%, the Cyclical is thge only element that Economists think you can calculate, the structural element is a secondary number in that you cannot calculate it directly it is generated by its relationship to something else.

The cyclical deficit is based on the "Output Gap" the diference between what the economy can produce and what it is producing.

Treasury Mar 2010:
Output gap = 6% / Cyclical deficit = 3.4%

OBR Jun 2010:
Output gap = 4% / Cyclical deficit = 2.3%

The question is what do you think is a realistic value of the output gap after the Credit Crunch with its 6.4% reduction in GDP peak to trough and two years where the natural growth rate of the economy has not been registered, approx 5% is my thought.

Consequently the output gap was very low when estimated by the Treasury and totally ridiculous when measured by AB that well known Tory place man.

Next up is why would anyone want to underestimate the output gap? Because as all good dog boilers know the smaller the output gap the smaller the cyclical element of the deficit and the larger the structural element becomes.

The larger the structural element of the deficit the greater economic cover there is to cut the dole, cut state spending and make the poor and the weak eat thye family pet.

Sniffy wants to eliminate the structural deficit of 8.8% in 4 years. He wants to go in quick and deep not to save the economy but to generate room for tax cuts in 2015. He knows that the number for the structural deficit is tripe but it provides economic cover for his dog boiling and it will generate wiggle room for tax cuts.

As always with Sniffy:
great politics, shite economics.
Political chancer taking risks with the recovery.
The results are worse than I could ever have imagined.

AD wanted to halve the deficit in 4 years.
When it was being discussed in Nov 09 the deficit was estimated by the Treasury at 12.5%, of the back of a 7+5 forecast.

AD = 6.25% reduction over 4 years.
EB said this was too much, better go for 5 years.

2009/10 actuals comes out at 11.1%.
The AD formula then becomes 5.5% over 4 years.
EB agrees because the numbers are closer to his view.

Consequently Sniffy is playing fast and lose with the recovery.
The Treasury were playing fast and loose with their forecasts.
The OBR led by that Tory placeman, AB were just having a laugh with their numbers.