Ed balls

Ed Balls walked into two traps on Newsnight yesterday evening. First, he seemed stumped when Jeremy Paxman asked him if he was praying that George Osborne was right. Paxman’s ‘gotcha point’ was that if Osborne isn’t right the country is in deep trouble and Balls wouldn’t want that. But Balls’ more serious slip was to say, “My view, though, is that the central outcome isn’t that we see a resumption of growth.” This, as coalition sources have been pointing out today, allows them to present any growth as a vindication of their strategy. For all the talk about the NHS today, the economy still remains the central battleground in politics.

Oh dear, we’re back to letter-writing again. 52 academic sorts — including the Labour advisor Richard Grayson and Blue Labour proponent Stuart White — have a letter in today’s Observer urging George Osborne towards a ‘Plan B’ for the economy. They even sketch out, in less than 150 words, what that Plan B might look like. And, strangely enough, it has more than a tinge of Ed Miliband about it, including — and I quote — a green new deal; a focus on targeted industrial policy; the empowerment of workers; “unsqueezing” the incomes of the majority, and so on. I say we’re back to letter-writing again, because it’s all so

This week’s Spectator reveals the rather tantalizing fact that Peter Hyman, Tony Blair’s former director of strategy, is setting up a Free School in East London. This – I kid you not – is a very good thing. Newham School 21 will teach kids between the ages of 4 and 18 – an ambitious span of ages – and will open its gates in September 2012 if all goes to plan. Whatever you think about Blair, Hyman is a quietly impressive figure, coining the phrase “Education, Education, Education” and then leaving Downing Street in 2003 to become a teaching assistant. Now, as the deputy head of a school in Ealing,

Aside from the “Calm down, dear” drama, there was something else worth noting from today’s PMQs: David Cameron trying for a calmer debate on the deficit. He admitted that his government is not really being that much more aggressive than Gordon Brown would have been. They’re cutting £8 for every £7 that Brown and Darling proposed for 2011-12, he said. It’s a line that Nick Clegg road-tested in his speech to the IPPR last week, and it represents a new and welcome strategy. To date, the rhetorical differences have been stark. The Tories have said: we’re the big bold cutters, Labour are deficit deniers. Labour has replied: your cuts are

Can Ed Miliband and Ed Balls save Labour in Scotland? The two Labour heavyweights have decided to move in to rescue their party’s disastrous campaign in Scotland — with Balls being sent up north to sharpen his party’s teeth. A desperate measure for a desperate situation: Labour has not only blown a 10-15 point lead over the SNP in just a few weeks, but now languishes some 10-13 percentage points behind. A mammoth, humiliating defeat looms. Until now, Labour has liked to portray its campaign for the Holyrood elections as a totally Scottish affair: run in Scotland, organised in Scotland and led by Scottish politicians. Not any more. Senior staffers

It’s a funny thing, reading the speech on AV that Nick Clegg delivered to the IPPR this morning. It starts off as you might expect: putting some distance between his party and the Tories. Everything is Liberal-this and Liberal-that, while “conservatives” are cited as the opponents of change and choice. But then, from nowhere, comes one of the most brutal attacks on Labour that Clegg has delivered in some time. “For every £8 we are cutting they would cut £7,” he quivers. “To deny that reality is to treat the British people like fools.” The New Statesman’s George Eaton has sifted through the numbers here, but the main point is

The global debate about how we live within our means is moving fast. I spent a week in Washington while Congress and the President hammered out their deal on this year’s budget. The deal was significant because all sides agreed on the need to cut spending now. After days of brinkmanship, they agreed to £38 billion in-year cuts. Significant, perhaps, because America has now started to tackle its huge deficit. But everyone agreed it is a small downpayment ahead of a much bigger debate to come.   What’s fascinating for us here is that President Obama’s proposals are to cut the deficit slightly faster than we are here. Congress would

Developments aplenty on the Portuguese front — the most noteworthy being that Britain is probably in for a €4.8 billion share of the €80 billion tab. Robert Peston explains the numbers here, although it basically comes down to the lending mechanisms that will be deployed. Add up our 13.5 per cent exposure to the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism (EFSM) with our 4.5 per cent exposure to the IMF’s pot, and it comes to €4.8 billion. Or, rather, £4.2 billion. The politics of the situation are precarious for the coalition. Yet I doubt they’ll be unduly troubled by Ed Balls’s suggestion that “it would be better if this was sorted out

Nick Clegg’s interview with Jemima Khan (née Goldsmith), in which he admits to crying regularly to music, is already coming in for predictable mockery. But the point that Clegg makes about how his job is affecting his kids is worth dwelling on.   Clegg is not the only coalition minister to fret about this. Sarah Vine, Michael Gove’s wife, wrote earlier this year about how she worried about the psychological effect on her children of people verbally assaulting her husband in front of them. During the Labour leadership contest, Ed Balls, for all his faults, spoke movingly about his concern over how he would protect his kids from what was