Labour has had a poor run of Autumn Statement and Budget responses for a couple of years now, and with only today’s statement and the 2015 Budget to go before the General Election, the stakes were pretty high for Ed Balls. The Tories had clearly turned up expecting him to do a terrible job, and their heckling club (which you can read more about here) was out in force.
The Shadow Chancellor stood up to a wall of noise. Tory backbenchers had arranged a number of words to shout at him before entering the Chamber. I understand that one of them was ‘apologise’, which they’ve used before on Balls. It was so bad that Speaker Bercow had to tell them off before the frontbencher had even started speaking. Then he spent the first chunk of his speech trying to say what he’d planned to say, turning to individual Tory backbenchers and telling them that they should listen to what he had to say, and letting Bercow step in again and again to scold badly-behaved MPs.
Sledging can have a good effect on a debate. As in cricket, it can be a witty way of undermining your opponent’s confidence without anyone watching realising what you’re up to. Today that didn’t work. The Tories were so rowdy that they appeared boorish. This was not the skilled heckling from the slips but a tipsy spectator shouting indiscriminately while making a beer snake which then collapses on his own head. It is odd that they decided to heckle quite so aggressively: given the very poor performances that Balls and Miliband have given after these things for the past few years, you might have expected the governing party to let the Shadow Chancellor get on with it and fail alone.
After a while they subsided and Balls did produce a decent response which included him waving the OBR book at Osborne and saying that borrowing is actually £12.5bn higher than expected in the Budget. His closing lines weren’t bad, either. He said:
‘He’s changed the way he’s styled his hair, but he can’t brush away the facts, Mr Speaker! People are worse off and the fact is he has failed to balance the books in this Parliament. I’ve gotta say for all his strutting, for all his preening, for all his claims to have fixed the economy, he promised to make people better off: working people are worse off. He promised we were all in this together, then he cut taxes for millionaires. He promised to balance the books in this Parliament, and that commitment is now in tatters.
‘Every target missed, every test failed, every promise broken. We need a recovery for the many not just a few, we need to balance the books in a fair way with a long-term plan to save our NHS. That is the Autumn Statement we needed. It will take a Labour government to deliver it.’
Of course the Shadow Chancellor didn’t say very much that gave the impression that Labour could do a better job, and this is what the Opposition should be doing at this stage in the Parliament. He may well find that his adequate response is lost among good headlines tomorrow – a successful Autumn Statement or Budget day for the Opposition is mainly predicated on it being a bad day for the government in some way either as a result of bad economic figures or a cock-up. But he also didn’t have a bad turn at the despatch box, and in previous years the poor quality of the Labour response has become a big story. The problem is that not being considered a weak performer in the Commons is not quite the same as the electorate considering you a good prospect for handling the country’s finances.
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