What do you do when you’ve just taken a by-election battering? Erm, wheel out Ed Balls to rally the faithful in an interview with the Telegraph. It’s a strange read – mainly because Balls seems to force a more caring, understanding tone, before slipping all too easily back into dividing line politics – and I’ve pulled out some of the key passages, with my own comments, below:
The Milburn report. The government have been tight-lipped about Alan Milburn’s damning report on social mobility this week; a report that they commissioned themselves. And Balls’ comments on it here show why. He struggles to come up with anything like a convincing line; at first conceding that Milburn is “right,” before claiming that, “I actually think it’s an astonishing achievement that we’ve arrested that rise in inequality.” He lists figures on schools reaching GCSE benchmarks, but there are plenty of counter-statistics that can be deployed to show the appallingly inadequate state of schooling in this country: not least that the performance
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