Ed balls

Ed Balls has secured a debate for next week calling for the government to postpone for a second time the 3p rise in fuel duty that is due this January. It's a pretty shameless move by the Shadow Chancellor, given these rises are ones that Labour instituted in 2009 and 2010. But he clearly believes that it is worth a little bit of political positioning similar to his chutzpah on the EU budget. In an article for PoliticsHome, Balls tries to address the rather awkward point about his own party's policy on fuel duty rises, writing: 'Of course difficult decisions are needed to get the deficit down. That's why Labour put up fuel duty in the past. But we often delayed or cancelled planned duty rises based on the circumstances at the time - including at the height of the global financial crisis.

Cutting the EU budget is a very good idea. Much of it is spent inefficiently and its priorities are all wrong, 40 percent of it goes on agriculture. Given that a cut would also be popular with voters, why doesn’t David Cameron propose one? The reason is that there’s virtually no chance of getting agreement to it. If there’s no agreement, the EU will move to annual budgets decided by qualified majority voting—stripping Britain of its veto. But Labour’s tactical positioning in calling for an EU budget cut has been, as Isabel said earlier, extremely clever. It has left Cameron defending a complicated position which puts him on the wrong side of public opinion and many of his own MPs.

A large part of the Tory message at the next election will be ‘don’t let Labour ruin the economy again’. One of the things that will help the Tories make this a topic of the campaign is Ed Balls’s constant desire to defend the record of the last Labour government. As Jonathan noted earlier, when Andrew Neil pointed out that Labour was — contrary to Balls’s earlier denials — running a structural deficit in 2007, Balls got into a long-winded attempt to justify both that and his denial of this point last year.

Finally, some good news for the government - the public seems unconcerned by its recent difficulties. In spite of plebgate and George Osborne's train ticket dominating this weekend's papers, polling out today shows the Conservatives have managed to reverse their voting share decline in the wake of their party conference. The Populus/Times poll places the Tories on 35 per cent, up five points from September while Labour are down by the same amount. This brings Labour's lead down to where it was before this year's budget in March 2012: The Guardian/ICM polling shows a smaller increase, with Labour on 41 per cent and 33 per cent for the Conservatives. This is still a two point improvement on their last poll: However, the ICM figures are adjusted in favour of the Tories.

One of the more sombre passages in Ed Miliband's barnstorming speech this afternoon was when he tackled the thorny issue of what a Labour government would actually do about the cuts. While both the Labour leader and Ed Balls are keen to regain the trust of the British public on the economy, they are also trying to introduce a counter-narrative to the 'are you ready to trust Labour with your money again?' line that Nick Clegg produced last week. Just as George Osborne and colleagues have spent the first two and a half years selling the line that they are 'clearing up the mess' of the last Labour government, Miliband and Balls are now increasingly talking about the economic inheritance that a Labour government might receive in 2015.

Ed Balls’ speech was a wide-ranging affair. It started with a tribute to the Olympics and Tessa Jowell’s role in securing them, a make-nice gesture given how badly those two have got on over the years. It ended with a paean of praise to the Labour spirit of 1945. In between, it included attacks on the Liberal Democrats as the ‘same old Tories’ — Balls’ response to Sunday newspaper reports that they won’t work with him. On the economy, the Ed Balls two-step was much in evidence. He promised to spend money now, saying he’d put the as yet unknown proceeds from sale of the 4G spectrum into house-building.

On BBC1 Sunday Politics just now, Harriet Harman rowed back from what she told me for this week's magazine: that Labour would not match Tory spending plans at the next election. The change in position is significant as it shows how Labour—and Ed Balls, in particular—want to keep this option open ahead of 2015. In 1997, Gordon Brown’s commitment to keep to Tory spending plans for two years largely succeeded in reassuring people that Labour could be trusted with the economy. Balls, who was one of the architects of this policy, is said to be interested in doing the same in 2015. The thinking is that it would take the deficit off the table as an election issue and make it harder for the Tories to claim that a Labour government would spook the markets.

The announcement by Ed Balls today that Labour would conduct a zero-based spending review is a cute piece of political positioning by the shadow Chancellor. It allows him to sound tough—we’ll look at every piece of public spending and see if it delivers value for money, and is an olive branch to those Blairites who still moan about how the Brown Treasury blocked this idea when Labour were in power. But the weakness with it is that it puts off these decisions until after the next election. Based on conversations with various Tories this morning, they are confident that this will make it easier for them to portray Labour as being incapable of making tough decisions on spending.

Like the whole of this Liberal Democrat conference, Nick Clegg's speech to delegates did the job, but didn't exactly lift the roof from the Brighton Centre. Those watching were happy: they applauded warmly and laughed at all the jokes (which hasn't always been the case this week in Brighton), and they were utterly overjoyed when the Deputy Prime Minister announced that Paddy Ashdown will chair the party's 2015 general election team. He told members to 'go for it', and raised two laughs when he quoted Jo Grimond, saying that he could 'see generations of Liberal marching towards the sound of gunfire. And yes, I see them going back to their constituencies to prepare for government.

Is the government about to start digitally invading every single aspect of our lives? In this week’s cover feature, Nick Cohen questions exactly what and how the government is trying to achieve with the upcoming snooping bill. Discussing the matter future on our View from 22 podcast, director of the Big Brother Watch campaign group Nick Pickles warns that a heavy handed bill would not only 'slam the breaks' on the economy but the beneficiaries may not be who you would expect: ‘We’ve had some quite hysterical editorials saying this is about terrorists and pedophiles but the bill itself says the biggest beneficiary is actually Her Majesty’s Revenues and Customs.

Ed Balls has today made his very own full, open and comprehensive offer to the Liberal Democrats – or, rather, to Vince Cable. The shadow chancellor said he could work very well with Vince (but, pointedly, not Nick Clegg). 'I wish George Osborne would see Vince Cable as a man to do business with and listen to, rather than telling the newspapers he is putting his allies in [to the Business department] to try and surround him and hold him back. Vince should be listened to on banking reform and on the economy. I could work with Vince. I would like the Liberal Democrats to say right now that this coalition has failed and we're going to change course.' Balls can't really work with anyone (just ask Ed Miliband); and nor is he likely to have to.

It was straight back into the old routine at PMQs today. Ed Balls heckled the Prime Minister who shouted back, John Bercow managed to call several of the MPs who irritate the Prime Minister most, and Cameron was, perhaps, slightly ruder to Ed Miliband than he had been intending to be. Miliband’s attack, followed up by several Labour backbenchers, was that no one should believe Cameron’s new initiatives on housing, infrastructure and planning given that the PM’s previous, much heralded initiatives on them have not delivered. The point is debatable. But Cameron responded, as he so often does, with a slew of insults — some clever, some not so.

The first polling on the Corby and East Northamptonshire by-election is out today and not surprisingly, it suggests that Labour will take the seat by a landslide. The poll commissioned by Lord Ashcroft predicts Corby will fall in line with national polling trends — a collapsed Lib Dem vote, reduced Tory presence and a resurgent Labour: If the by-election result follows this pattern, it will represent a 9 per cent swing to Labour since the 2010 general election. If this were replicated at a national level, it would be enough to sweep Ed Miliband back into Downing Street. The poll also gives some reaction to Louise Mensch's resignation.

Announcements from the International Monetary Fund are worded in such a way that everyone reading them comes away with something slightly different. So shortly after today's report on the UK economy was released, Ed Balls put out a statement saying the report was a 'very serious warning to the Chancellor that urgent action to boost jobs and growth is needed'. He concluded his press release by asking 'how much worse do things have to get before the Chancellor finally changes course?'. Now, today's report from the IMF is not cheery reading for George Osborne. It passes this bleak judgement on the economy: 'Recovery has stalled. Post-crisis repair and rebalancing of the UK economy is likely to be more prolonged than initially envisaged. Confidence is weak and uncertainty is high.

Andrea Leadsom seems to have backed down a little from last night's suggestion that George Osborne 'should apologise' for saying that Ed Balls had 'questions to answer' about Libor. This morning, perhaps after a cheery morning phone call from someone at CCHQ, she took to the airwaves to clarify what she had said:  'Look, I was talking about a very specific point last night, which is the extent to which the Labour party may have leaned on the Bank of England, which Paul Tucker completely refuted. I want to be very clear here: this is an inquiry about the banks’ behaviour, and Ed Balls still has a huge amount to answer for about his time in office during the last parliament, when the tripartite regime absolutely failed us and allowed the banks to get into this mess.

In my Observer column today I say that a judicial review into the banking scandal would have achieved little unless the judge could have persuaded the politicians to change the law. As if on cue, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls popped up to demonstrate that they have no desire to change banking law in any way that might make a difference. Their proposals to expand the number of banks and make it easier for customers to switch accounts, amount to more of the same. Instead of five big banks running on taxpayer guarantees, we will have seven big banks running on taxpayer guarantees. Neither Labour nor the Tories is willing to accept that the deregulation of finance from the 1980s on allowed bankers to take insane risks.