Ed Balls, so used to dodging elephant traps laid by George Osborne, is going to lay a few of his own tomorrow when he gives his speech to the Labour conference. The Shadow Chancellor, in an attempt to do something about Labour’s poll weakness on the economy, will announce that he would freeze child benefit and cut ministers’ pay by five per cent until Labour has balanced the books.
He will say:
‘We will have to make other decisions which I know will not be popular with everyone… I want to see child benefit rising in line with inflation in the next parliament, but we will not spend money we cannot afford. So for the first two years of the next parliament, we will cap the rid in child benefit at one per cent. It will save £400 million in the next Parliament. And the savings will go towards reducing the deficit.’
‘This is less troublesome to the Tories than the announcement about ministerial pay, which David Cameron will struggle to match given his poor relations with his party and the sense that he has no idea what it is like to exist merely on a MP or minister’s wage (which most voters have no idea about either, but for rather different reasons).’
But what is troublesome for Ed Balls is his own pledge in the speech to ‘get the current budget into surplus and the national debt falling as soon as possible in the next parliament’. That will require a continuation of some very unpopular cuts indeed that go far beyond the freezing of child benefit.
One shift in the Labour mindset following the defection of Douglas Carswell was that its MPs started to think more about life in a 2015 Labour government than about how on earth their party was going to get elected. It wasn’t all excited dreaming, though: many of realised as they peered into that future government that they’d have to end up explaining a heck of a lot of unpleasant things to voters who they’d tried to entice with something a little more hopeful. And the party needs to be more honest with voters about the ‘difficult decisions’ it plans to make if it is to catch up on economic polling. Ed Balls will need quite a few more unpopular announcements stuffed up his sleeve if he’s going to be able to come close to meeting these challenges.
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