Every week, David Cameron turns bright red, and he doesn’t answer any questions properly at Prime Minister’s Questions. This never gets reported in the media.
And yet suddenly Ed Balls is said to turn red in the Autumn Statement, and this is big news. More than the explosion in numbers of food banks. More than the astronomical energy bills.
The demeanour of David Cameron still brings considerable unease to those people who call themselves Conservatives. Even they see David Cameron as ‘nimn’ – “not in my name”.
At prime minister’s questions, he finds it hard to rein in his Flashman reflex. His infamous ‘Calm down dear!” was a notorious low point in the manner of such exchanges. His answers are ever more sneering and personal, determined to characterise his rival as weak and useless. Worryingly, there has been a tendency to pick on a characteristic, like a stammer, and to home in on it like an Amazon drone. It is not pleasant to watch the jabbing finger and the reddened face, especially when the Tory backbenchers behind him join in with bullying jeers. It’s bullying, David Cameron does it every week, and the media don’t bat an eyelid.
There are a number of different causes of blushing. This is characterised by feelings of warmth and rapid reddening of your neck, upper chest, or face. Flushed skin is a common physical response to anxiety, stress, embarrassment, anger, or another extreme emotional state. Facial flushing is usually more of a social worry than a medical concern.
It’s unlikely that Ed Balls had ‘Chinese restaurant syndrome’ that morning. Chinese restaurant syndrome describes a group of symptoms that some people experience after eating food from a Chinese restaurant. He would have had to have eaten a Chinese meal for breakfast. This is unlikely unless it happens to be a particular domestic habit of his, and his wife Yvette Cooper MP.
A food additive called monosodium glutamate (MSG) is often blamed for Chinese restaurant syndrome, but scientific evidence has not proven MSG to be the cause of the symptoms. However, there is currently not another scientifically proven explanation for the symptoms. Most people can eat foods that contain MSG without any problems. A small percentage of people have bad reactions to the food additive. Because of the controversy over MSG, many restaurants, Chinese and otherwise, now advertise that they do not add MSG to their foods.
The accusation is that Ed Balls is appearing like a ‘aggressive cry baby’, rather than ‘conceding defeat’ on the economy.
Balls famously said on May 24, 2012, “Our complacent and out-of-touch Prime Minister and Chancellor have spent the last week claiming their plan is on track, but?.?.?. Britain’s double-dip recession is even deeper than first thought. What more evidence can David Cameron and George Osborne need that their policies have failed and they now need a change of course and a Plan B for growth and jobs.” And yet there is considerable debate as to whether we had a double (or triple) dip recession at all.
Balls had further said on October 12, 2011, “We were also told the public sector job cuts would be more than outweighed by the rise in private sector jobs?.?.?. It has been a complete disaster.” The Government currently claims that three jobs have been created in the private sector for every public sector job lost.
Ed Balls’s much-panned response to George Osborne’s Autumn Statement has renewed the speculation about whether he will be replaced as shadow chancellor before the general election. Among commentators, Alistair Darling is again being touted as the ideal replacement. He’s done the job before and has indicated that he’d be open to a frontbench role.
However, this flies in the face that Darling has clearly put all his energies into his ‘Better Together’ campaign against Scotland becoming an independent country of the UK.
Unless you’ve met Ed Balls in person, it’s easy to underestimate how much gravitas he has as a member of the Shadow Cabinet Team. He also has a considerable personal following amongst Labour MPs. As a graduate of both Oxford and Harvard, he is well recognised as somebody who understands his economics, and is able to apply a sense of realism to economic policy.
Whilst the replacement of Balls with Darling would win plaudits from the commentariat (who revere him for his battles with Brown), it is less certain that it would massively enhance Labour’s election prospects. Switching Darling for Balls would bring with it a whole suitcase full of problems, such as Miliband appearing ‘weak weak weak’ over the direction of his economic policy. He has previously ‘disposed of’ Alan Johnson in that job.
In this regard, the appointment of the man who was Chancellor at the time of the financial crisis would be a real political gift to the Tories. Osborne and Cameron make much of Balls’s Treasury past, but how many outside of Westminster know that he was City minister from 2006-07, or that he previously served as Brown’s special adviser?
And it could be a genuine problem that Balls has ‘The Brown Touch’. That is: every policy pitch turns into Gordon Brown. Gordon Brown was notorious for being fastidious about making sure the argument was correct, rather than making sure that the presentation was very swanky. This is one of the several arguments used to explain Brown’s personal style of the ‘election debates’ of the last election.
The red face is certainly easier to spread as a meme on Facebook or on Twitter, than the deficit. However, entertaining though it is, it’s simply a diversion tactic to stop people talking about ‘the cost of living crisis’. It’s smoke-or-mirrors to those who criticise the Conservative Party for producing an environment disproportionately friendly to their people in ‘big business’, whether it’s in the realm of NHS privatisation, the Royal Mail privatisation, or tax cuts for ‘hardworking hedgies’.
The red face is even more bogus than the attack on Labour for an emergency cash injection into the investment banks, as even inspired in the US; or the money spent on Labour which contributed to a ‘record level of satisfaction’ in the NHS. But we are three years into five years of a desperately incompetent Government, so it’s probably expected that Tory spin doctors spread their toxic shit everywhere.
My blog on dementia is here: http://livingwelldementia.org
