Calls from Balls

4 July 2009

The Spectator on Ed Balls' claims about the public finances

Mr Balls insisted that when he said ‘less debt’, he was referring to debt ratio: the ratio of national debt to gross domestic product which is forecast in the Budget (optimistically) to start falling in eight to nine years time. Yet — as he must know perfectly well — when listeners to the Today programme heard the words ‘less debt’, they will have thought, quite reasonably, that he meant ‘less money owed by the government’. They will then have wondered, no less reasonably, why, yet again, a senior minister was taking the public for fools. Either Mr Balls was lying when he spoke or — much more alarmingly — he was in the grip of Orwellian doublethink, genuinely persuaded for a moment that black is white, and two plus two makes five.

Normally, the traffic between ministers and journalists does not warrant repetition. But this is an unsettling parable of all that has gone wrong with this government in its dying months. On a day meant to be devoted to a major policy reform, the senior minister unveiling the proposals is busy hectoring bloggers. He is offered the opportunity to rebut the argument and declines angrily: only absolute obedience to his instructions will do. And he stands by a position (in this case on public debt) which is clearly untenable because, in the Brownite universe, it is unthinkable to retract: to adapt Solzhenitsyn, ‘We Never Make Mistakes’. Sorry, Mr Balls, but you do; and, as you will discover on election day, the voters have well and truly rumbled you.

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Nicolas Storey

July 2nd, 2009 12:12pm Report this comment

Calls from Balls? Here's another one: why is The Spectator apologising to Alistair Campbell over its suggestion that he asked for the Butler report to be toned down? You might be 'champagne for the brain' but what have you got left between your legs -and is it subject to Brewer's Droop? One of three things: Butler did not have eyes to see; Butler toned down his report himself or, thirdly, the government of the day and its advisers (amongst which, Alistair Campbell had an unelected, central role) asked for this. Yes! the same government of the day which The Independent newspaper exposed as a fraud on Parliament (naming Blair and his Atorney-General Goldsmith as liars), in an article that was not, so far as I recall, ever subject to any threatened proceedings or any miserable apology. A fraud in that, to pursue Daddy Bush's feud against Saddam Hussain, the British government of the day, bent out of shape intelligence reports to seek to persuade Parliament to launch an unlawful invasion of another sovereign territory. In attempting further to expose this fraud, a renowned scientist, Dr David Kelly, died - and there has never been any satisfactory explanation of this. The people, in this Great Western Democracy (that is imposing itself, even on people that little understand it (and might be no better off if they did)), still expect answers to the Kelly riddle - that cannot really be explained away as a suicide of a man (a) brave enought to speak out yet (b) so afraid of - maybe an unjustified threat of - prosecution for an Official Secrets Act 'violation' that he'd kill himself under a tree.

Christopher Chantrill

July 3rd, 2009 12:09am Report this comment

Hmm. I suppose it's completely coincidental that this week you are running Cass Sunstein's recipe on how to make an extremist: Put Brown, Balls, and McBride into a room and stir.

chrush

July 3rd, 2009 12:21am Report this comment

No...try as I might I am STILL unclear on what on earth Balls and his crew are still doing here. Thought they`d have taken out the milk bottles after the BNP proved to be more popular than they are.Yet here they are-hanging around like a bad smell and hoping for a war or something...ANYTHING!
Balls and his Bisto kid wife personify all that is rotten in the body politic. Browns bagman feels entitled to scoff the criossants in the Green Rooms and the media indulge him with the perpetual personal use of the conversation stone. For Gods sake-give him no oxygen of discussion or publicity and he will gasp in the stale flatulence and whiff of gangrene that NuLabor tell us is lavender! Get them out!!!

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