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Are the media right to concentrate on Ed Balls' red face?
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
Ed Balls 'trending' doesn't mean Keynesian policies are suddenly popular
from one of the Ed Balls spoof Twitter accounts today.
There are reasons, of course, why people or things tend to trend on Twitter. In my experience, never having read an official study on this, this tends to be when people die, or are reported to die. Or else, something a bit defamatory-worthy has occurred, and people are ‘intrigued’. Or else, something very minor has happened on BBC Question Time, BBC Any Questions, BBC Any Answers, Britain’s Got Talent, or the X Factor. It is nonetheless interesting watching the phenomenon of people jumping on bandwagons, and a sense of collective excitement, such as when Barack Obama was re-elected. Or else, there is a sense of genuine shock at sudden news, such as death of Baroness Thatcher.
There can be a temptation for all of us to read too much into things we observe in the social media. Hundreds of photoshopped images about George Osborne or Iain Duncan-Smith do not cause a change in direction of travel over the economy or universal credit. Why then do people devote so much time to doing them, as well as posting pictures of cute kittens? Why do people also put in so much time and emotional into having passionate debates on Twitter with well-known journalists? There is an element of narcissism which pervades all our society, where we often do things not for the benefit for anyone apart from ourselves. However, this culture is also pervasive in the politicians who seek us democratically. Many people as they become older become jaded about what politics actually achieves, and, whilst they find the topics themselves actually quite interesting, find the actual political process quite rank and stifling.
Today was “Ed Balls Day”. Ed Balls, it is reputed, accidentally tweeted his own name, leading to thousands of people re-tweeting it. It has become a viral meme, and the subject of an affectionate joke. What does this do for Ed Balls’ popularity? Not much, of course, in that most people have either heard of him as someone who helped to wreck the economy under Gordon Brown, or a brilliant Keynesian economist who trained at Oxford and Harvard, or somewhere in between. Have people used seeing the Ed Balls tweet to seek to discover what the Labour economic policy is or isn’t? No. Granted, there are going to be people who have re-tweeted Ed Balls’ name not because they love him, but because they loathe him.
All of this feeds into the apparent paranoia of politicians who feel that politics has become irrelevant. Seeking out the reasons for the millions of people not bothering to vote has become almost obsessional. Already, the post mortems have begun about why the section 75 NHS regulations vote was lost in the House of Lords. Various theories abound ranging from the relative success of the sales patter of Baroness Williams and Lord Clement-Jones, the fact that elderly Labour peers could not find suitable accommodation in London that night, or an insufficient number of Crossbench peers were unconvinced to vote against the Regulations. And so it could go on, but the issue remains why do people not bother voting. I have also noticed a trend where people find not only politicians boring, but the generally tribalist partisan nature of debate. The legislative process, like the judicial one, is adversarial, and is therefore based on competition not collaboration. The end result is that people end up being hostile to each other, exaggerating their differences, but not drawing attention to the similarities. This, of course, leads to a very distorted manner of taking policy further. For example, the Labour Party have amplified policy differences in procurement to the point of arguing that the privatisation rollercoaster has accelerated, but it is of course Labour which introduced NHS Foundation Trusts (which some believe are the ultimate ‘units’ for a privatised secondary care system) and the previous procurement regulations in the form of the Public Contracts Regulations 2006. Supposedly, the Conservatives are ‘building on’ the legacy of New Labour in “free schools”, and much to the embarrassment of Labour, Baroness Thatcher is reputed to have said that her greatest legacy was Tony Blair or New Labour. The Conservatives have attacked the attack on the Bedroom Tax (or “Spare Room Subsidy”) by arguing that Labour introduced something similar for the private sector, and now this idea is being extended to social housing, despite being a socially divisive policy and incapable of generating much revenue.
So the idea of Ed Balls ‘trending’ is of course neither here nor there, and utterly irrelevant to the political discourse today. It doesn’t make Ed Balls any more popular, and doesn’t get round the popular anti-Keynesian attack of ‘How can the solution to borrowing be yet more borrowing?” That meme, while not viral, has been very successful in conveying a popular idea held by some that a Keynesian solution to an economy recovery is to pour fuel on the fire, or to have the ‘hair of the dog’ while suffering from a hangover due to the night before. However, it is incredibly hard to think of a punchy meme in reply to that line of attack which has been successful in the USA today. Another popular meme is, “Why would you hand the keys of the car back to the people who crashed it in the first place?” A reasonable answer to this would be to identify who actually crashed the car – was it the bankers/banks or the State, and were the problems due to the crash per se or due to ‘lack of regulation’ in the lead up to the crash? Nonetheless, both memes focus the mind on the more negative aspects of Labour’s tenure in government, and the public seem to be generally unpersuadable on the economy. The Labour Party, likewise, feel that they are still the party of the NHS, despite the well documented problems in Mid Staffs, though there is a genuine debate about the extent of morbidity and mortality even after two voluminous reports.
Many in all parties feel of course let down by the media, and it might appear that all parties feel equally let down. For example, most recently, some people feel that the coverage of the NHS reforms has been poor, and the media are hopeless at explaining how we have come to have just escaped a ‘triple dip’ recession when the economy was in fact recovering in May 2010. Whether you buy into the idea that ‘the economy is healing’, or this Government would like ‘to make work pay’, it is crystal clear that, whatever the nature of debate (whether it is Afghanistan or welfare), people have a markedly varying understanding of the issues – but have an equal say in the democratic process. Ed Miliband always spoke of ‘building a movement’ in the Labour Party, and by this it means that he would like to capture a sense of national pride and trust in the politics of Britain. He feels that ‘One Nation’ is the best way to do this, and the results from his detailed policy discussions are yet to emerge into the sunlight. When I used to ask my late father to cheer up, he used to say, “What do you expect me to do, Shibley? Dance?” This is in a sense the main problem faced by Labour today, one of expectation management. The discussions of the ‘legacy’ of Baroness Thatcher were at times as finely focused on the purported successes of turning Britain around ‘from a basketcase’ to the social and economic distress (illustrated by the damage done to local communities), pursuant to the closure of coalmines in Easington. People are now muttering again, “I am to be honest very disillusioned with Labour, but this current Government are terrible”. Part of this disconnect with Labour is that people simply don’t trust them to do what they say on certain key issues, such as repealing the Bedroom Tax, or repealing the Health and Social Care Act (2012). And to be blunt, Labour’s “got previous” on this. As a result of the general election in 1997, Labour did not abolish the market in the NHS as they had promised. And yet, Labour does have a reasonably loyal ‘fan base’, and people who genuinely like Ed Miliband as a person. Miliband has always been mindful of being the guy who ‘promised too much but delivered too little’, but it will exasperate even his loyal followers if he turns out to be the guy who in fact ‘promised too little and delivered also very little.’ Ed Miliband can always play the ‘we don’t know how the economy will be in two years’ time’, and get his shadow cabinet to argue that making impossible promises would be reckless, but in the meantime Ed Miliband needs a steady trickle of bits of evidence suggesting that he is heading in the right ‘direction of travel’. For example, the idea of incentivising businesses to implement ‘the living wage’, in a socially inclusive policy which is not overtly ‘tax and spend’, is a useful one, and one which Miliband can legitimately campaign on.
It is hard for Labour members to tell why members of the public dislike them so much, but this is of course the challenge for Labour in the next two years. In the meantime, the challenge is to work out how many people who vote for Labour in the local council elections are doing so, not only because they are protesting against this government, but also find the offering of Labour feasible. These local elections are a timely reminder of how barmy UKIP actually might be, in promising more austere cuts than currently being offered, or what actually differentiates the Liberal Democrats from Labour in a meaningful way. The social media, it can be argued, is a great way for people to write on and discuss the issues that concern them. Without the social media, a meaningful discussion (away from the BBC) about the section 75 NHS regulations would have been impossible. However, as Baroness Williams provided in her speech last week, Twitter can easily be discredited through referring to the wealth of misinformation ‘out there’. From my own personal experience, I feel I can tell what the reaction will be from Labour members towards Baroness Williams, on issues pertaining to the NHS, before she has opened her mouth. Whilst the Ed Balls meme might be equally divorced from real debate, and, whilst it has become a popular past-time to criticise ‘armchair activists’, the role of technology in political movements cannot be ignored. Used responsibly, it can override some of the cynicism we all share, as long as a small minority of bloggers do not persuade themselves they are speaking on behalf of all of us. And possibly the “Ed Balls meme” reminds us of one very important thing relevant to all of us: we should be less obsessed about our image (but not in an irresponsible way), and should from time-to-time take ourselves less seriously.
Andrew Neil and the so-called Ed Balls "porkies"
The Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives were very concerned about growth in 2010. This is clear when you watch David Cameron’s opportunistic whingeing in the Budget debate for 24 March 2010, prior to the 2010 General Election (as recorded in Hansard). The context is some quibbling over the growth figures in David Cameron’s response:
And we all know what has happened to growth since May 2010. Some would say it’s due to throttling consumer demand through raising VAT, killing infrastructure projects such as “Building Schools for the Future”, and a cornucopia of other unintelligent measures taken collectively by George Osborne and Nick Clegg. Their bluster was indeed very strong, as was their personal hatred of Gordon Brown. But I’m saying nothing.
In April 2012, new figures revealed that Britain had plunged into the first double-dip recession since 1975 and is enduring its longest economic slump for a century. This was in fact the first double dip for 37 years and a nightmare scenario for Chancellor George Osborne, who predicted a rapid return to growth when he embarked on his austerity programme, and Mr Cameron, who had previously declared Britain ‘out of the danger zone’.
Source: tradingeconomics.com
It suited Nick Clegg and Vince Cable to defer as much blame onto Gordon Brown for the recession, rather than to blame global factors.
Indeed, Cable, Clegg and Osborne have been wishing for the Eurozone to implode much more than it has, in the same way that they have always hoped for the GDP figures to be ‘revised upwards’. Northern Rock, indeed in 2007, was one of many banks throughout the world to take on risky investments. Many of the assets that these banks had on their balance sheets started to lose their value (like ‘loans gone bad’ or securities derived from mortgages and other loans). The Bank of England became the last resort for the British banks as liquidity froze throughout the global market due to a lack of confidence. The global crash was predicted by Roubini (2010) who said: ‘As homeowners defaulted on their mortgages, the entire global financial system would shudder to a halt as trillions of dollars’ worth of mortgage-backed securities started to unravel’ but the United States and the United Kingdom refused to acknowledge sub-prime mortgages as a threat to the economy’ (N. Roubini and S. Mihm (2010), Crisis Economics: A crash course in the future of finance, Allen Lane, United Kingdom, 2010, p.15). At the time, Nick Clegg criticised the Labour government for not having done anything about getting banks to lend:
However, Clegg is being utterly disingenious about the UK government’s ability to lend money given the overall international climate. Firstly, banks are affected by Basel Capital rules that financiers keep complaining about; subtle reforms on, say, liquidity coverage ratios are also “biting hard”. This overall, it is argued, makes banks far more conservative about lending money and fearful about how they manage their balance sheets. Gillian Tett in the Financial Times in October 2011 gave a very elegant overview of the situation, as it was then. Nick Clegg appears now to have some sort of weird amnesia what had caused the deficit to balloon, but he was very clear about the bail-out at that time.
Clearly then, the “deficit” story is the one to base the entire credibility of the raison-d’être of the current Coalition, but the facts clearly state that prior to the global financial crash the deficit being run by Labour was comparable to that run by Norman Lamont and Ken Clarke, as clearly shown here:
The reason that the public generally mistrust all parties with the economy is that the majority of the general media have not conveyed the issues with sufficient accuracy or balance. The Conservatives, Andrew Neil and the Spectator, have been fixated on whether or not Ed Balls knew there was a structural deficit in 2008, whereas English law fundamentally relies on there being a presumption of innocence. Ed Balls is convinced that he, and the Bank of England, did not realise there was a structural deficit in 2008, and indeed the more relevant situation is what to do now. For example, in its twice-yearly fiscal monitor, the IMF said that for countries including the UK: “If growth should fall significantly below current projections, countries with room for manoeuvre should smooth their planned adjustment over 2013 and beyond.” This represents conditional support for Mr Osborne’s deficit reduction plan so long as growth does not disappoint again. Indeed, Andrew Neil and colleagues then curiously perseverate on how much Ed Balls knew then, whilst being completely oblivious to any of the arguments about why the GDP remains stagnant now, why the banks fail to lend, and how a failure in securitised mortgages caused a global recession.
“To summarise, both governments presided over a fiscal strengthening in their first three years in office followed by a weakening over the following eight. But we should note that Labour has used more of its borrowing to finance capital investment rather than current spending than the Conservatives did. Under the Conservatives, the structural budget deficit continued to deteriorate until year 14 (1992–93). It remains to be seen when it will reach its trough under Labour.”
This rather begs the question: what was Mervyn King actually worried about in 2008? King in a speech at a dinner hosted by the IoD South West and the CBI at the Ashton Gate Stadium, Bristol in 2008 provided the following:
“The low level of national saving is apparent from the current account deficit – our new net borrowing from overseas – which in the third quarter of last year was, relative to GDP, the biggest in the past fifty years and the largest in the G7. It is possible to run a current account deficit for a considerable period. Australia, for example, has done so in every year since 1974. But our own position is becoming more difficult. For some years we have been able to finance current account deficits by borrowing, often through banks, at unusually low interest rates on world capital markets.”
In other words, he appeared to be confident about our “paying off our deficit” due to “low interest rates on world capital markets”. Of course, one lie leads to another, and we’ll now be clearing up the mess that Clegg left in 2015. Clegg will probably defend successfully his seat in 2015, but, as the Liberal Democrat Party implodes, there’ll be nothing left for him to defend, and he will better off in the House of Lords or Europe. Meanwhile, it is quite likely that some sort of austerity plan will be mid-way until 2018, and the disappearance of our AAA coveted credit rating (as warned by Fitch recently) will be a tribute to Clegg and Cameron’s incompetent management of the economy.
How one lie led to another – we'll be clearing up the economic mess Clegg left
Nick Clegg falsified the story, thereby rewriting history. He then got himself into Government, and then ruined the country.
It is easy to see the magnitude of Clegg’s failure when you refer back to the Budget debate for 24 March 2010, prior to the 2010 General Election (as recorded in Hansard). The context is some quibbling over the growth figures in David Cameron’s response:
This is in fact what has happened since May 2010. In April 2012, new figures revealed that Britain had plunged into the first double-dip recession since 1975 and is enduring its longest economic slump for a century. This was in fact the first double dip for 37 years and a nightmare scenario for Chancellor George Osborne, who predicted a rapid return to growth when he embarked on his austerity programme, and Mr Cameron, who had previously declared Britain ‘out of the danger zone’.
Source: tradingeconomics.com
It suited Nick Clegg and Vince Cable to defer as much blame onto Gordon Brown for the recession, rather than to blame global factors.
Indeed, Cable, Clegg and Osborne have been wishing for the Eurozone to implode much more than it has, in the same way that they have always hoped for the GDP figures to be ‘revised upwards’. Northern Rock, indeed in 2007, was one of many banks throughout the world to take on risky investments. Many of the assets that these banks had on their balance sheets started to lose their value (like ‘loans gone bad’ or securities derived from mortgages and other loans). The Bank of England became the last resort for the British banks as liquidity froze throughout the global market due to a lack of confidence. The global crash was predicted by Roubini (2010) who said: ‘As homeowners defaulted on their mortgages, the entire global financial system would shudder to a halt as trillions of dollars’ worth of mortgage-backed securities started to unravel’ but the United States and the United Kingdom refused to acknowledge sub-prime mortgages as a threat to the economy’ (N. Roubini and S. Mihm (2010), Crisis Economics: A crash course in the future of finance, Allen Lane, United Kingdom, 2010, p.15). At the time, Nick Clegg criticised the Labour government for not having done anything about getting banks to lend:
However, Clegg is being utterly disingenious about the UK government’s ability to lend money given the overall international climate. Firstly, banks are affected by Basel Capital rules that financiers keep complaining about; subtle reforms on, say, liquidity coverage ratios are also “biting hard”. This overall, it is argued, makes banks far more conservative about lending money and fearful about how they manage their balance sheets. Gillian Tett in the Financial Times in October 2011 gave a very elegant overview of the situation, as it was then. Nick Clegg appears now to have some sort of weird amnesia what had caused the deficit to balloon, but he was very clear about the bail-out at that time.
Clearly then, the “deficit” story is the one to base the entire credibility of the raison-d’être of the current Coalition, but the facts clearly state that prior to the global financial crash the deficit being run by Labour was comparable to that run by Norman Lamont and Ken Clarke, as clearly shown here:
Therefore, it is perfectly clear that David Cameron and Nick Clegg have hugely misled the UK on the situation it is currently in, and ‘one lie leads to another’ unfortunately. The Conservatives, Andrew Neil and the Spectator, have been fixated on whether or not Ed Balls knew there was a structural deficit in 2008, whereas English law fundamentally relies on there being a presumption of innocence. Ed Balls is convinced that he, and the Bank of England, did not realise there was a structural deficit in 2008, and indeed the more relevant situation is what to do now. For example, in its twice-yearly fiscal monitor, the IMF said that for countries including the UK: “If growth should fall significantly below current projections, countries with room for manoeuvre should smooth their planned adjustment over 2013 and beyond.” This represents conditional support for Mr Osborne’s deficit reduction plan so long as growth does not disappoint again. Indeed, Andrew Neil and colleagues then curiously perseverate on how much Ed Balls knew then, whilst being completely obvious to any of the arguments about why the GDP remains stagnant now, why the banks fail to lend, and how a failure in securitised mortgages caused a global recession.
“To summarise, both governments presided over a fiscal strengthening in their first three years in office followed by a weakening over the following eight. But we should note that Labour has used more of its borrowing to finance capital investment rather than current spending than the Conservatives did. Under the Conservatives, the structural budget deficit continued to deteriorate until year 14 (1992–93). It remains to be seen when it will reach its trough under Labour.”
This rather begs the question: what was Mervyn King actually worried about in 2008? King in a speech at a dinner hosted by the IoD South West and the CBI at the Ashton Gate Stadium, Bristol in 2008 provided the following:
“The low level of national saving is apparent from the current account deficit – our new net borrowing from overseas – which in the third quarter of last year was, relative to GDP, the biggest in the past fifty years and the largest in the G7. It is possible to run a current account deficit for a considerable period. Australia, for example, has done so in every year since 1974. But our own position is becoming more difficult. For some years we have been able to finance current account deficits by borrowing, often through banks, at unusually low interest rates on world capital markets.”
In other words, he appeared to be confident about our “paying off our deficit” due to “low interest rates on world capital markets”. Of course, one lie leads to another, and we’ll now be clearing up the mess that Clegg left in 2015. Clegg will probably defend successfully his seat in 2015, but, as the Liberal Democrat Party implodes, there’ll be nothing left for him to defend, and he will better off in the House of Lords or Europe. Meanwhile, it is quite likely that some sort of austerity plan will be mid-way until 2018, and the disappearance of our AAA coveted credit rating (as warned by Fitch recently) will have been a direct pack of lies we have been fed for the last few years.
An outstanding conference speech by Ed Balls which is textbook Keynesianism to promote growth
This is a brilliant plan for recovery by Ed Balls MP. Whilst drawing on aspects of management which were probably not familiar to John Maynard Keynes, the emphasis is most definitely on infrastructure investment to promote growth. A Keynesian argument might be that you do not need much money to identify a small disruptive change, but you might invest in implementing a minor change which dislodges incumbents in an international competitive market. Also, it is very clever that Ed Balls has combined this with a focus on the green economy, in accordance with the workload of Luciana Berger MP who works closely with Rachel Reeves MP in ensuring that the business case for a ‘green economy’ is made. Luciana has been arguing at fringe events why green ideas should not be a casualty in a drive towards austerity. This plan is indeed visionary, and would be exactly the sort of plan which would work for a flatlining economy. The only problem is that Ed Balls MP would not be able to implement such a plan until early May 2015 at the very earliest.
I am enclosing the full text of Balls’ speech as follows.
Full text of Ed Balls speech this morning to the #Lab12 conference
Conference, we meet here in Manchester, two years on from our leadership election, a contest held in the shadow of a General Election defeat.
And we all know what’s supposed to happen when political parties lose elections: acrimony and division, the party turning in on itself, out of touch with the views of the country.
Well Conference, two years on, in this generation, we have bucked that trend. I can’t remember our party ever being so united, so determined to win back the trust of the people.
And with our economy in recession, and the unfairness and incompetence of this Tory-led coalition now laid bare, let us show we are the people to rebuild Britain, strong and fair for the future.
And Conference, making the case for change, setting the agenda – on reform of our media, and banks, responsibility in our economy from top to bottom; showing the strength of purpose and moral conviction which won him the job and which will get him to Downing Street; Conference, let us pay tribute to my friend, our leader, Britain’s next Prime Minister, Ed Miliband.
Conference, I am proud to serve in Ed’s Shadow Cabinet – now with more than 40 per cent women, the first time that has ever happened in British politics.
And what a contrast to David Cameron’s Cabinet: where the men get the jobs, the women get the sack and only the chaps get the knighthoods.
Let me ask you this: what does it take to get sacked from David Cameron’s Cabinet?
Swear at a police officer and call him a ‘pleb’? And you’re defended to the hilt.
Get caught red-handed texting market sensitive information to News International? You get promoted.
Flat-line the economy and deliver the most unfair and shambolic Budget in living memory? And you stay in post – more than that, you’re allowed to do it part-time.
Do all those things and David Cameron will let you keep your job. But not if you’re a woman.
Conference, what kind of Prime Minister thinks it’s fair to sack a 54 year old woman from his Cabinet because she’s ‘too old’ – and then give the job to a 56 year old man instead?
Let me tell you: a Prime Minister who only appoints five women in the first place, sacks three of them, demotes the other two – and then attacks the Labour leadership for not being ‘butch’ enough.
Butch? Butch? Whatever did he mean? And if David Cameron is butch, where does that leave George Osborne?
Perhaps this is why George Osborne will never be sacked. A Prime Minister and a Chancellor destined to go down fighting together. And this time, let’s see them riding off into the sun-set. Butch Cameron and the flat-line kid.
And Conference, doesn’t it feel good to be back here in Manchester?
Or, should I say, to be back here in Labour Manchester: four Labour MPs, three world class universities, two world-beating football teams, one Labour Council. And not a single Tory Councillor in this whole city – not a single one.
Let us pledge today to keep it that way, and elect the brilliant Lucy Powell as Manchester’s first ever Labour woman MP.
And let me say too, I can think of no-one better to be Manchester’s first ever Police and Crime Commissioner than the wise and highly respected Tony Lloyd.
And Conference, at a time of such tragedy for policing in this city, our whole country remembers two brave officers who lost their lives doing their duty, and we pay tribute to all those public servants up and down the country – police officers, fire-fighters, our armed forces – who every day put their lives on the line to keep us safe.
And Conference, as we rightly praise the success of London 2012, let’s not forget it was Manchester’s hosting of the 2002 Commonwealth Games which showed the way, proving that Britain was ready to stage the biggest international sporting events.
So Conference, we salute Graham Stringer and Sir Richard Leese as we salute all those people who brought the Olympics to London, and made them such a success – Tony Blair and Prince William, Ken Livingstone and Gordon Brown, Lord Coe and Boris Johnson, too many others to mention.
But let us remember that none of them would have been able to play their part if not for the one person who made it all possible. Conference, please join me in thanking Dame Tessa Jowell.
Conference, it was Tessa’s officials who told her it would be a disaster to bid for the 2012 Games. It would cost too much, the stadiums would never be ready, London’s transport wouldn’t cope, the security would be a nightmare.
Tessa could have listened to all those concerns, but she didn’t. She persevered. We won the bid. And the rest is now part of our national history.
And Conference, this is the lesson we all should learn. With wise leadership and long-term vision and a strong partnership between government and citizens, business, trade unions and the voluntary sector, we can do great things, we can lead the rest of the world and we can rebuild Britain for the future.
But if you listen to the doubters, if you never take a risk, if you flinch when obstacles are in the way, you will never get anything done.
And if you spend your whole time fighting short-term political battles – Dave versus Boris, Boris versus George, George versus Vince – you will never rise to the long-term needs of the country. And in the end, you let people down and lose their trust.
And nowhere is that more obvious than in our economy today.
Thank goodness the Olympics has given us a short-term shot in the arm, that might just be enough to take us out of recession this quarter.
But that is no substitute for a long-term strategy. Not when families are struggling to make ends meet. Not when food and fuel prices are going up, but wages are frozen and tax credits cut.
Not when so many young people have been unable to find work or stay-on in education. Not when so many small businesses are struggling to raise finance so they can survive until the year-end.
Not when so many working people in the private sector and public sectors are worried about their jobs and their pensions – the human cost of this economic failure.
Remember what David Cameron, and George Osborne and Nick Clegg promised: that faster tax rises and deeper spending cuts would secure the recovery and make Britain a safe haven; that theirs was the only credible plan to deal with the national debt; and that we were all in this together.
Conference, the recovery secured? We’re just one of only two G20 countries in recession – the longest double-dip recession since the Second World War.
A credible plan to deal with our debts? Because we are in recession, the deficit is now not going down, it’s going up – up by 22 per cent so far this year. Rising borrowing not to invest in the jobs of the future but to pay for the mounting costs of this government’s economic failure.
Conference, there is nothing credible about a plan that leads to: a double-dip recession, thousands of businesses bust, a million young people out of work, billions wasted on a soaring benefits bill, and borrowing going up not down. That’s not credible, that is just plain wrong.
And as for ‘we’re all in this together’, we don’t hear that line anymore.
Not from a Chancellor who presented the most unfair and unpopular Budget in a generation. A Chancellor who tried to raise taxes on pasties, caravans, churches and charities, but who refuses to look seriously at proposals for a mansion tax.
A Chancellor who in six months’ time will raise taxes for pensioners on the very same day he cuts the top rate of tax for the very richest – a £3 billion tax cut, giving £40,000 a year to a millionaire.
Conference, what kind of government asks millions of pensioners to pay for a tax cut for millionaires?
What kind of government believes low-paid women will only work harder if you take away their tax credits and make them worse off, but millionaires will only work harder if you give them a tax cut to make them better off?
Conference, isn’t this the truth, we know what kind of government this is: failing on the economy, failing on the deficit, hitting the many to help a privileged few. Arrogant, complacent, out of touch.
Conference, it’s the same old Tory government. David Cameron, George Osborne, Nick Clegg. The same old Tories, every one of them.
But you know what the worst thing is? For two years they’ve told us all this pain will be worth it in the end, that it’ll be short-term pain for long-term gain.
But what we are now seeing is short-term pain already doing long-term damage.
Look at the facts: over 33,000 companies already gone bust since the General Election; investment plans cancelled – or diverted overseas; our economy weaker, capacity lost, more prone to inflationary pressures when the recovery finally comes; child poverty rising, and long-term youth unemployment becoming entrenched, damaging them for the rest of their lives.
And Conference, if we carry on like this – a divided coalition, muddling through, no vision, waiting for something to turn up – the danger is that two lost years becomes three and four and that we slip into a lost decade of slow growth, high unemployment and stagnation.
Lost investment, lost output, lost jobs, lost exports, lost tax revenues – a decade when we fail to make the investments and the reforms we need to make our economy stronger and fairer for the future.
And Conference, it doesn’t have to be this way.
While Britain has been stalled over the past two years, other countries have been forging ahead. Last year private investment in Germany rose by over seven per cent. One million extra students enrolled in university in America. China is building 80,000 miles of roads a year and is now planning 70 new airports.
And here in Britain? Private investment? Down over 2 per cent last year.
More students? No, over 50,000 fewer.
And not one of the road projects David Cameron announced last year even started in construction.
And when you look at this picture of stagnation and inaction in our economy, it’s no wonder the deficit is now rising.
We warned two years ago that drastic spending cuts and early tax rises – too far, too fast – risked choking off the recovery and making a difficult situation worse. We warned that you either learn the lessons of history or you repeat the mistakes of history.
Because this is the fundamental truth: if more people are on the dole, not paying taxes, you can’t get the deficit down. If businesses are going bust, not hiring new workers, you can’t get the deficit down. If the economy’s not growing, you can’t get the deficit down.
And that is why we must act now to kick-start the recovery, tackle the causes of rising borrowing and start to make our economy stronger for the future.
A year ago, we set out five actions the government should take – then and now – to boost growth:
Tax bankers’ bonuses and build 25,000 social homes for rent and guarantee a job for 100,000 young people.
Genuinely bring forward long-term investment in infrastructure.
Temporarily reverse the damaging VAT rise.
Give every small firm taking on extra workers a one year national insurance tax break.
And cut VAT to 5 per cent for a year on home improvements and repairs.
But Conference, since last year David Cameron’s government has done next to nothing.
Their economic plan is failing – and they don’t know what to do. Plan A, Plan B, Plan A plus – with this government, I just don’t see any plan at all.
Conference, one year on, the need to kick-start the economy is even more urgent.
So we must go further. With 119,000 construction jobs lost in two years and a 68 per cent fall in the number of affordable homes being built, we need bold and urgent action now.
So with Hilary Benn and Jack Dromey, this is what I propose. The Government is anticipating a windfall of up to £4bn from the sale of the 4G mobile phone spectrum.
In the good times, Labour used every penny of the £22bn from the sale of the 3G licenses to pay off national debt. But in difficult times, we urgently need to put something back into the economy.
So with this one-off windfall from the sale of the 4G spectrum, let’s cut through this Government’s dither and rhetoric and actually do something. Not more talk, but action right now.
Let’s use that money from the 4G sale and build over the next two years: 100,000 new homes – affordable homes to rent and to buy – creating hundreds of thousands of jobs and getting our construction industry moving again. Add to that a stamp duty holiday for first time buyers buying homes up to £250,000 and we can deliver real help for people aspiring to get on the property ladder.
Conference, a clear and costed plan to kick-start the economy and get people back to work. Building the homes that we need now and for the long-term. Building our way out of recession and re-building Britain for the future.
And we also need reform to boost long-term investment and skills – the only routes to rising living standards for working families.
Chuka is right to say we need a modern industrial policy to support long-term wealth creation, with strategic support for our advanced manufacturing and service industries.
And we need to work and campaign together to tackle tax avoidance, end bogus self-employment, prevent a race to the bottom through regional pay; and enforce the minimum wage, help parents balance work and family life and make sure our labour market is genuinely flexible and fair to working people, and let’s go further and promote the living wage.
And we know too our banking system needs cultural change and radical reform – reform which this Government is only interested in watering down.
That is why Ed Miliband and I are clear, we do need:
A full, open and independent public inquiry into the culture and practices of our banking system.
Radical reform to separate retail and investment banking.
Active support for mutuals and co-operatives.
A continued campaign for an international financial transactions tax.
And a proper British Investment Bank – fully backed by the Treasury.
And Conference, let me say this about the hundreds of thousands of working people, earning ordinary salaries, who work hard every day behind the counters of our high street banks.
They were as shocked and dismayed as everyone else at the gross irresponsibility and greed of a few millionaire bankers at the top who caused such damage and gave their industry a bad name. Working people who want tougher regulation, who want banks to work for the long-term interests of our economy, and who do not deserve to be pilloried for their hard work and service.
Conference, the financial crisis did expose deep-rooted problems in our economy.
After the global financial crash, it was always going to be difficult to get the deficit down. And even if we do get the economy growing again, even if we do reform our banking system for the future, we’re still going to face tough choices in the years ahead.
But the longer this Government staggers on with a failing economic plan, the worse it will get and the harder the job will be. Hard times will last longer than all of us hoped. And we cannot promise to put everything right straight away.
That is why, however difficult this may be, when we don’t know what we will inherit, we cannot make any commitments now that the next Labour government will be able to reverse particular tax rises or spending cuts. Because, unlike Nick Clegg, we will not make promises we cannot keep.
Of course we’ll make different choices – we’ll do things in a fairer and more balanced way and put jobs and growth first.
But Conference, as I said to the TUC, we must be upfront with the British people that under Labour there would have been cuts and that – on spending, pay and pensions – there will be difficult decisions in the future from which we will not flinch.
Before the next election – when we know the circumstances we will face – we will set out for our manifesto tough new fiscal rules to get our country’s current budget back to balance and national debt on a downward path.
Not a meaningless fiscal rule like George Osborne’s – a promise to balance the books in five years time, with that five year period moving forward every single year.
Conference, our fiscal rules will be monitored, independently, by the Office for Budget Responsibility, and we will take the action required to meet them. And when we sell off the Government’s shares in the banks every penny will go to repay the national debt. Conference, fiscal responsibility in the national interest.
And because we all know there can be no post-election spending spree, in our first year in government we will hold a zero-based spending review that will look at every pound spent by government: carefully looking at what the Government can and cannot afford, rooting out waste and boosting productivity, building on the work that Rachel Reeves and Jon Trickett are leading.
But we will do things differently to this Government. Not slashing budgets without a care in the world – damaging the economy, hitting women harder than men – but assessing every pound of taxpayer’s money including for its impact on growth and fairness.
Not opting for short-term cuts that look ‘easy’ but which end up costing more in the long-term – like deep cuts to youth services, to adult mental health services and to public health.
And not ducking the hard long-term issues we know we haven’t properly faced up to and which transcend parties and parliaments and where we badly need a cross-party consensus. So let us get a long-term plan to support the most vulnerable in our society – looked-after children and adults needing social care.
Because this is not just about policy, but about the kind of country we want to be and the way we do our politics.
Where we face important long-term challenges, we must seek a consensus that puts short-term politics aside and puts the national interest first, just as we did over a decade ago when we made the Bank of England independent.
And nowhere is such a consensus more essential than on our national infrastructure.
The lesson of the Olympics is that if we approach major long-term infrastructure projects by building a cross-party sense of national purpose then we can deliver.
And yet, it took 13 years from the opening of the Channel Tunnel to complete the High Speed Rail link to London. Crossrail was delayed for decades.
And why is this so often the case? Yes, our cumbersome planning system. Yes, legitimate concerns for the environment. Too often in the past, governments have assumed that vital public infrastructure can only be funded by public investment – and then baulked at the bill.
But, above all, successive governments – including our own – have ducked or delayed vital decisions on our national infrastructure, allowing short-term politics to come first.
And just look at this government: will Boris or Dave win on Heathrow? Will Conservative MPs block High Speed rail? Will George see off Zac on renewable energy?
What a ridiculous way to run the country. No wonder business is fast losing confidence in this government’s ability to make long-term decisions.
But Conference, it is not just a problem of this government or this parliament – and we have to be the party to break this cycle.
Because if we don’t, if we put off major decisions for another generation, it will be our children and grand-children who will face the consequences.
Let me give you some examples. We must decide how and when we are going to deliver super-fast broadband across the whole of the UK and avoid a two-tier Britain.
We must decide whether we need to replace our antiquated National Grid, or risk more power cuts in the future. We must decide as a country on a clear plan to invest in nuclear power, wind and tidal power and other renewables so we can lead the world in delivering clean, de-carbonised energy and green jobs.
We must decide how we are going to protect our country from rising sea levels and exceptional rainfall, including whether we need to replace or reinforce the Thames Barrier to prevent London from flooding.
And we must decide, alongside vital decisions on rail and airport capacity, how we are going to get more freight off the roads and onto the railways – it won’t help that our grand-children are all driving electric cars if they are still sat in gridlock on the M6 or the M25.
On all these issues, if we don’t start to plan now, what will we say in 30 years’ time when our children ask: ‘why didn’t you act when there was still time?’
That is why we need a comprehensive long-term plan to rebuild Britain’s infrastructure for the 21st century, and a cross-party consensus to deliver it.
And it is why, too, at a time when Government budgets are tight, we must think innovatively about how we can finance these vital projects over the coming decades, drawing on the private sector and long-term pension savings.
So Ed Miliband and I have asked Sir John Armitt, the chair of the Olympic Delivery Authority, to consider how long-term infrastructure decision-making, planning, delivery and finance can be radically improved.
And I can announce today that Sir John has agreed to lead this work and to draw up plans for a commission or process, independent of government, that can assess and make proposals on the long term infrastructure needs of our country over the coming decades and help build that consensus.
Not repeating the mistakes of the past, but learning from them. Building a consensus which crosses party lines, without chopping and changing one parliament to the next. A consensus to re-build Britain for the future.
And Conference, there is another lesson we must learn from our history.
Many people have said over recent weeks: ‘this has been Britain’s greatest ever summer’.
But let me remind you of an even greater summer still: the summer of 1945 – the end of six hard years of war – when our nation welcomed its heroes home from the battlefields of Europe, Asia and the Atlantic, and celebrated together the defeat of fascism.
Conference, our predecessors were elected that year to rebuild a country ravaged by conflict.
They faced even greater challenges than we face today: an economy enfeebled by war; a national debt double the size of ours today. And they made tough and unpopular decisions: to continue with rationing; to cut defence spending; and to introduce prescription charges.
But that Labour Cabinet also remained focussed on the long-term task ahead. And they learned from history and rejected the failed austerity of the 1930s.
And that meant they could put in place long-term reforms, enduring achievements, vital to our country’s future: the Beveridge report; new homes for heroes; the school leaving age raised; and, for the first time ever, a National Health Service free to all, based on need not ability to pay – over 60 years later, celebrated in our Olympics opening ceremony for all the world to see, still today the greatest health service in the world.
Conference, they were very different times. But it is our task to recapture the spirit and values and national purpose of that time.
Just think of the people in whose footsteps we now follow. Working men and women who, in the years before, had see a hardship many of us will never experience.
But their suffering did not teach them selfishness, it taught them solidarity. And they never settled for second best in the struggle for education for all, free health care and proper rights at work.
Conference, we owe it to them – but more than that, we owe it to our children and their children to come – to learn from that example, to make the tough decisions but not to sacrifice their futures.
Because when our grandchildren look back at us, what will they say? Will they say we cast a generation of young people on the scrapheap of unemployment?
Will they say we dismantled the NHS and made it harder to go to university?
Will they say we plunged Britain into a decade of economic stagnation while other countries raced ahead? Will they say we left Britain less prosperous, more unequal, more unfair?
Or will they say – even as we made tough and painful decisions – that ours was the generation that got a record number of young people into apprenticeships as well as university.
Ours was the generation that safeguarded the NHS, and started the rebuilding of our national infrastructure.
Ours was the generation that tackled our debts by growing and reforming our economy – and making sure the banking crisis that caused those debts could never happen again.
Ours was the generation that broke from the cycle of political short-termism and started to rebuild Britain anew in the long term national interest.
So let us go forward. Not flinching from tough decisions. Giving our young people hope. Rebuilding Britain for the future.
That is our challenge. That is our mission. Let us rise to it together.
Should Labour play the ball not the man?
“Play the ball not the man” – we can be bold enough to make a stand and do battle for our views and beliefs. But we must strive to be mature enough not to resort to unnecessary personal attacks upon people with opposing views. The “ball” is our personal view and the “man” is someone with the opposing view. The phrase derives from the world of soccer.
The starting point is unfortunately how the Conservatives have approached the matter. The UK economy is now an outright disaster, entirely thanks to George Osborne enabled by the Liberal Democrats. At a personal branding level, Osborne would like to be viewed as a great strategician within this party, but actually there is no strategy in any orthodox meaning of the term using by business, finance and management, let alone politics. Osborne is a tactician, and even then it is firefighting partly as a result of self-inflicted errors. One is unable to call somebody a great tactician who has made a million U-turns, like following the recent Budget.
George Osborne has personally attacked Ed Balls, because he would like to put the image of Balls and Brown as aggressive mobile phone chuckers playing havoc with the economy. The Tories do not produce a narrative on how money was spent as an emergency measure to save the banks, and nor do they wish to tell the truth to the public, in the same way they lie about how we ought to go bankrupt like Greece. Osborne would like to make mendacious, highly vindictive, personalised, extremely nasty smears rather than engage with Balls about why Balls was right. The chain of events is as follows: put VAT up so that consumer spending is decreased, pull investment in the construction industry by stopping projects such as ‘Building Schools for the Future’, create a high level of unemployment as a price well worth paying, receive fewer tax receipts, and spend a high level of benefit; whilst giving your mates a tax cut, and taking people silently off the register for their disabled benefits, leading to a record number of appeals in tribunals.
They are aided and abetted in this immoral activity by the BBC in this. The BBC provides inaccurate, highly biased and imbalanced reports, completely contrary to their own editorial guidelines. They on a regular basis confuse real news with entertainment, and prefer to report on their own reporters than the real issues facing this country. Therefore, Labour has a very limited means of getting its message across, arguably apart from the new media. Whilst some excellent blogs exist, not everyone (particularly the elderly) have access to the internet, so still remain disenfranchised by politics. Whilst it does not matter that politicians effectively spin things with very little evidence, as indeed Lord Lamont conceded regarding George Osborne’s direct accusation that Ed Balls was directly involved in corrupt activity, they can continue to argue that people are ‘apathetic’ about politics. People are not apathetic about politics, in that they cannot wait to see the Liberal Democrats obliterated on May 8th 2015. David Cameron is hated by much of his party, and whilst one term governments are extremely rate this government is most unusually incompetent.
A further problem is that many people are now warming to Gromit. This means that people prefer to listen to Miliband over a judicial inquiry for banking, Murdoch and the NHS, than listen to the corporate-funded Conservative Party which would rather hire-and-fire people without notice and seem to have become senior members alleged of very serious crimes. So Labour is forced to get personal, because they have such little scope to explain the arguments. And whilst Maurice Glasman produces incoherent rants about intellectual issues which nobody can understand, and Stephen Twigg appears to wish to consign members of society to ‘military schools’ , you can understand why voters feel frustrated.
George Osborne and the Defamation Bill: a government of all perspectives
The Government has a busy agenda, having to enact legislation on defamation at one end, and people in the media wondering whether George Osborne has in fact overstepped the mark beyond the customary “rough and tumble” of politics. There has been a lot of hoo-ha about whether George Osborne’s comment in the Spectator was defamatory. This aside, as reported here in Business Week, is as follows:
“Osborne said in the Spectator that people close to former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, for whom Balls worked as an aide before becoming a minister in the previous administration, “were clearly involved” in the Libor affair and that “we just haven’t heard the full facts.” “My opposite number, who was the City minister for part of this period and Gordon Brown’s right-hand man for all of it, so he has questions to answer,” Osborne told the magazine. “That’s Ed Balls by the way.””
Put simply, libel is defamation in permanent form such as in writing (slander is oral). A defamatory statement is one which injures the reputation of another by exposing him to hatred, contempt, or ridicule, or which tends to lower him in the esteem of right-thinking members of society (Sim v Stretch [1936], 2 All ER 1237, 1240, per Lord Atkin).
In this discussion which follows, it is important to understand that no legal claims have been brought. The discussion is only for theoretical purposes, and no criminal offences have been demonstrated.
The putative claimant (Ed Balls) must prove that the statement was defamatory, that it referred to him, and was communicated to a third party. The onus then shifts to the putative defendant (George Osborne) to prove any of the three defences: truth (or justification), fair comment (in the matter of public interest), that it was made on a privileged occasion. ‘Vulgar abuse’ is not held to be defamatory (Thorley v Kerry [1812]), and it could be that George Osborne argues that it was ‘vulgar abuse’ made ‘in the rough-and-tumble of politics’. A problem for George Osborne is that innuendo can be held to be defamatory, and therefore such a statement may be defamatory; here the test is that ‘the hidden meaning must be one that could be understood from the words themselves by people who knew the claimant (Lewis v Daily Telegraph [1964]), and must be pleaded by the claimant. Here, the test therefore refers to the people who know Ed Balls, who presumably are not confined to the readership of Labour List or Left Foot Forward? The potentially defamatory remark is specific, as a remark aimed at a wider class of members which is sufficiently wide may not be defamatory (this issue is considered in some detail by the House of Lords in Knupffer v London Express Newspaper Ltd. [1944]).
Since its original publication in the Spectator, secondary reports of this accusation are now widespread. For example, the reports are now by Hélène Mulholland, Peter Edwards in Labour List, Andrew Trotman in the Daily Telegraph, Dan Hodges in the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian website, World News, Yahoo, and Nicholas Watt in the Guardian. However, such people who have reported on this would not be held to have committed a defamation, enshrined in s.1 Defamation Act [1996] as a defence of ‘innocent dissemination’, for a number of valid reasons including if the people knew or had reason to believe that what (s) he did caused or contributed to the publication of a defamatory statement.
We now have good reason to believe that the statement was false, but was made to discredit Ed Balls politically (therefore lower his reputation amongst right-thinking voters, quite literally.) Jill Treanor, Rajeev Syal and Nicholas Watt write in the Guardian: “Amid Tory unease over Osborne’s tactics, Balls demanded a public apology after Bank of England deputy governor Paul Tucker repeatedly told MPs that he had not been encouraged to lean on Barclays to cut its submissions.”
5.49 pm on the Guardian blog yesterday reads as follows:
Labour MP Chris Leslie has put out his response to Tucker’s evidence, calling for an apology from Chancellor George Osborne.
Osborne said last week that “people around Gordon Brown” were “clearly involved [in the scandal around the manipulation of Libor]… That’s Ed Balls, by the way”. Leslie says:
The game is up for George Osborne. It is now crystal clear that the allegations he threw around were completely wrong and without foundation.
The deputy governor of the Bank of England has made it 100% clear that neither Ministers nor officials leaned on the Bank of England to ask Barclays to fix Libor rates. In addition Bob Diamond has also said that he did not believe he was being asked by Ministers or officials to fiddle Libor rates.
The last Labour government was rightly concerned with legitimate policy changes to reduce inter-bank lending costs during the global financial crisis. The Conservatives at the time even said they did not go far enough to reduce Libor. But that is completely different from the deliberate fixing of the Libor rate, which Barclays traders were involved in over several years.
Statements made in either House of Parliament are subject to ‘absolute privilege’. The actual publication in the Spectator itself may not be subject to parliamentary privilege, though this would be a media lawyer not me to opine about. Osborne, if a claim for defamation were ever made, might be able to argue that this was a legitimate point of debate, raised in the public interest. Angela Newsom, on the Treasury Commons Select Committee, said on BBC’s “World Tonight Programme, “I think it was a very valid discussion at the time about who knew what and it has now been completely squashed by Paul Tucker.” Generally, this public interest defence would normally apply to the ‘activity of public figures’.
At the other end of government, the Coalition is producing the Defamation Bill, and this has now reached the ‘report stage’ of legislation. You may review of the pdf of the Bill here. However, the emphasis of the new defamation legislation is different.
However, these worthy libel law reformers are missing the point when it comes to science. Scientists do not usually get sued for writing peer-reviewed articles. Similarly, scientific publishers do not usually get sued for reporting on what happened at a scientific conference. They are normally sued over news or investigative articles or comment pieces, as the above two cases demonstrate. The proposed reforms for science would not have made a jot of difference to either case. An interesting article, written by Niri Shanmuganathan and Timothy Pinto are media lawyers at international law firm Taylor Wessing, who in fact represented Nature in the libel case brought by Professor El Naschie, raises the relationship between media law and scientific writings.
If parliament wishes to help prevent the law censoring scientific free speech, it may wish to consider two points. First, for science-related articles of high and genuine public interest, perhaps the claimant should have to prove that the publisher was being reckless in publishing in order to win. That is how American law deals with its “public figure” defence. Second, in any event, there should be a streamlined procedure so that it does not take two or three years for a publisher to dispose of a claim. This would help claimants too, as justice delayed is justice denied. Such a procedure could limit the length of parties’ submissions, the number of witnesses and the duration of cross-examination; with the judge firmly in charge of resolving the case as quickly and cheaply as possible.
It will be most interesting to follow the development of the Bill until it obtains Royal Assent in due course. These are certainly exciting times for the Government, as another issue of massive constitutional significance gets assessed summarily today in the Houses of Parliament – that is, reform of the House of the Lords.
Does it really matter if George Osborne peddles another myth?
I think most adults now know that politicians don’t tell the truth, in the same way that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. A ‘Nick Clegg pledge’ should be in the Oxford English Dictionary to mean a completely unenforceable electoral promise. So does it matter if George Osborne peddles another myth? Yes it does. It does because of the ‘it’s the economy stupid’ factor. For the first time ever, more people trust Ed Balls with the economy than George Osborne. Two big reasons contribute to this; firstly, Osborne’s plan A of austerity has blatantly failed, and, secondly, Balls predicted that the plan would fail. The media have recycled stories about Gordon Brown throwing around Nokia phones, Gordon Brown selling ‘gold bullion on the cheap’, Gordon Brown ‘raiding the pension funds’, so it’s only fair that some of the vitriolic smears are returned in the Conservatives’ direction. Unfortunately, “repetition does not transform a lie into truth” (Franklin D Roosevelt).
Here is a compilation of my favourite myths peddled by George Osborne.
1. “We will go bankrupt like Greece”
“Greece crisis allows Osborne to peddle myths”, Guardian, 9 May 2011, Larry Elliott (press here to go to the article)
“To the extent that Britain is like Greece, it is that slower growth is making it harder to get borrowing down. In all other respects, the comparison does not bear scrutiny, not least because the UK is outside the eurozone and thus has the advantage of a floating exchange rate. But Osborne has been able to use the crisis in the eurozone to justify what he has been doing at home, and he was at it again yesterday, combining an avowed reluctance for the UK to be involved in a second Greek bailout with the warning that it would be a disaster should the government backtrack on its deficit-reduction plans now.”
2. “The UK economy is like one giant credit card”
Prof Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate in economics, offers an explanation in his article, ‘Nobody understands debt’ (press here to go to the article in the New York Times).
“Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments. This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways. First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation. Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves. This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers, such as all the people who bought savings bonds. So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history.”
3. “Osborne used the statement to launch an unprecedented attack on Balls in the Spectator magazine, saying the Treasury minister in question may well have been Balls. “My opposite number was the City minister for part of this period and Gordon Brown’s right hand man for all of it,” he said. “So he has questions to answer as well. That’s Ed Balls, by the way.””
“Paul Tucker Says Ed Balls “Absolutely Did Not” Try To Lean On Bank Of England Over Libor” – The Huffington Post, 9 July 2012 (please here to go to the full article.)
“Bank of England deputy governor Paul Tucker has given former Labour ministers Ed Balls and Shriti Vadera a huge boost by telling MPs that he had no conversations with them about Libor-fixing during the height of the banking crisis in October 2008. Paul Tucker’s evidence – including a startling claim that he had no conversations with former business minister Baroness Vadera during that period – came as he answered a series of questions from MPs, insisting that he “absolutely” refuted claims he attempted to influence Barclays into manipulating the Libor rate. Speaking before the Treasury Select Committee, Mr Tucker also said that a record of a contentious phonecall he had with former Barclays boss Bob Diamond about lending rates gave the “wrong impression”.”
Does it matter? Yes, according to Fraser Nelson of the Spectator prior to George Osborne according to a recent article (press here to take you to that article), before being disgraced publicly for his smears.
“It remains to be seen how much of this will come out in the parliamentary inquiry. Tyrie may have one of the most forensic minds in Parliament, but he is not a praetorian – and I suspect he was deeply nervous about Osborne’s attack on Balls, fearing this may prejudge the outcome of his committee. But the Chancellor is, as always, thinking ahead to the next election campaign, where his slogan will be: Britain is recovering, don’t let Labour take us back to the bad old days. This explains why he is making his j’accuse with such force, and why Balls is defending himself with such venom. This is not about Barclays. For both Balls and Osborne, this is the first skirmish of the next election campaign.”
Just a word of advice from Quintilian: “A liar should have a good memory.”
A discredited government which the country is disgusted at
If you were a trader in shares of Osborne plc, on the basis of this afternoon’s session in the Commons, you’d be urging your fellow commodity sellers to cheer the mantra of ‘Sell, Sell, Sell’. David Cameron and George Osborne has made a very grave error of judgment, as the pathology in the culture of the banking industry is not just restricted to the LIBOR fraud from Barclays. Don’t let the BBC deceive you – the Government has been proven to be a moral cesspit, and the country is completely exasperated.
Bob Diamond in a incoherent set of responses yesterday in the Commons Select Committee, best described as ‘implausible’, was unable to explain why senior ‘LIBOR’ setters, who had apparently been doing the job for decades, were oblivious to the emails from traders publicly wishing the LIBOR rate to be fixed. He had no explanation why it took so long to get to senior management, and provided that the compliance officers had had a duty to report criminal malpractices. This is reminiscent of the “shock” experienced by Rupert Murdoch when he found out about the morally repugnant phone hacking which had apparently occurred at News International. The problem is that ignorance is no defence in our law at least, where company directors are, despite promoting the success of the company, are supposed to act with due care, skill and diligence.
On 28 July 2012, Rachel Reeves claimed that the Chancellor made a conscious decision to exclude LIBOR from the Financial Services Bill in its current form, even when he must have known that a massive FSA investigation into the scandal. It is hard to know how corporate governance mechanisms have failed so dramatically in News International and Barclays, but there is nothing more off-putting to a corporate investor than a large company, albeit running profitably, committing openly criminal activity to pursue its aims.
This afternoon, Ed Balls utterly annihilated George Osborne’s speech, like taking candy from a baby. Balls effectively told him to ‘put up or shut up’, asking him effectively to prove his nasty allegations or desist from making them. The involvement of the Bank of England over LIBOR and the gilt markets is far from clear, and the only way to achieve a solution on this is an independent judicial-inquiry. It is a complete non-argument to say that it is too time-consuming and too costly, as those might have been the same grounds of opposition for the Leveson Inquiry which has gone a long way to showing that the pathology was substantially more than some ‘rogue reporters’. The parliamentary select committee is not able to examine witnesses with the skill of a lawyer, or QC, and probably yesterday afternoon was the best advertisement yet for a judicial-led inquiry.
While this issue runs-and-runs, there can only be lasting damage for David Cameron, whose personal poll ratings are at an all-time low. There will be no closure from a parliamentary inquiry, aided and abetted by the Liberal Democrats who are expected to be electorally obliterated in 2015. The most damaging label for David Cameron is that of the Flashman identity, of a man completely ‘out-of-touch’. The judiciary is the only lifeline for restoring the credibility of the legislature, and a judiciary-led inquiry is the only way for MPs as a collective group to restore their damaged reputation. Cameron is damaged signficantly, the country is most unimpressed, and this could prove to be fatal for this government.
Osborne is a D-rate tactician, not a master strategist – remember Ireland?
On talking about Jagger, “Mick can write!” exclaimed Keith Richards in his autobiography. “It’s unbelievable how prolific he was. Sometimes you’d wonder how to turn the fucking tap off.” This has been written about at great length in the strategy of innovation literature (see for example this seminal article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker.)
That is in fact meant to be hallmark of people who have extraordinary gifts as innovators. True innovators, considered to be at the heart of the recovery that never was in the UK, are prepared to have a few ‘dead ducks’ in the hope that one or two brilliant ideas will survive. Unfortunately, there is no sign of Osborne turning the f*-ing tap off just yet. And great innovating strategist he is not.
There has recently been much greater scrutiny amongst the Tory commentators of this accepted teaching that George Osborne is a ‘master strategician’. There is no clear sign of what this strategy is, for example in economics, his ‘day job’. One thing that you can say confidently about Osborne, however, is that he is very good at concealing his cock-ups. Thankfully, Duncan Robinson in “The Staggers” of the New Statesman provides a ‘hard copy’ of how Osborne had famously bragged about the wonders of Ireland as an economy, which Robinson accurately summarised on account of: “Ireland boomed instead on a toxic mix of cheap credit, lax banking regulation and by becoming a borderline tax haven.” George Osborne, who is addicted to bragging, claimed, “Ireland stands as a shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policymaking.” It’s virtually impossible to find a copy of this article – so if you have a copy of it please do let me know.
Some people on the Right would actually like Osborne to turn the f*ing tap off. He has become a ‘falling star’ in the sky of the Tories, as Fraser Nelson, elegantly put it, with one of the most catastrophically delivered Budgets ever in history (which Fraser describes as “shambolic”). There wasn’t any screw-up too minor or major for this Budget, ranging from pasties, to attacks on philanthropists, raids on pensioners, to name but a few. Osborne succeeded in protecting the high earners, who are not part of the ‘squeezed middle’ however Ed Miliband has finally decided to define this. Osborne should like to be perceived as Corporatilist with a big C – his Big C ethos is best illustrated by Robinson’s view of the Osborne Ultimatum on tax: “We should learn from Ireland’s mistakes. Unfortunately, however, Osborne wants to copy them — at least judging by Osborne’s cuts to universities, the 3.4 per cent reduction in the education budget and his continued obsession with reducing corporation tax — to the point where companies could end up paying less tax than their cleaners.”
George Osborne’s economic policy has failed, in a perverse opposite to ‘not mending the roof when the sun was shining’, rather ‘not spending on a new roof when it was bucketing down with rain’. You don’t need to have read Keynes’ 1948 ‘General Theory’ to understand how Osborne produced a textbook plan for producing a recession. This strategy has failed Britain. ‘Master strategists’ decided how to allocate resources effectively and how to build a competitive advantage; for example, spending time on campaigning against Scottish independence, a position supported by Labour, fails on both counts.
Osborne is instead the Conservatives’ chief thrower of custard pies. He is throwing so many custard pies, he is hoping one does land on Ed Balls, but this is a dubious desperate tactic; as per an article by James Forsyth, in a frenetic ‘J’accuse’, Osborne remarks, “They were clearly involved.” In this way, he comes the closest of the mentality of an innovative strategist. Steve Richards is correct, as is James Macintyre, to observe leadership qualities in Ed Miliband, in being right to capture the agenda of those who wish to implement ‘responsible capitalism’. Miliband’s speech in 2011 at conference I feel will go down in history as seminal. It has laid the foundations for the judge-led inquiry into the media which has been most instructive in exposing the corrupt phone-hacking. The majority of the country, according to a You Gov poll, want a public-inquiry into the banking industry, feeling that a parliamentary-inquiry would effectively sanction a ‘cover up’. Recent polling has also provided that George Osborne is perceived as one of the worst Chancellors in recent history.
The media has thus far been running a media ‘democratic deficit’, with Nick Cohen correctly observing that the agendas of writing the Corporatilist articles in the Right Wing press being at odds with the majority of readers who comment on them. The irony is that corporates don’t want a toxic culture either, with Prof. Porter, Professor of Strategy at Harvard Business School, who makes Osborne’s understanding of strategy look like O-level standard (keeping ahead of the times with Michael Gove), will be the first to tell you (see his seminal article in the Harvard Business Review). Corporates attract greater investment if they are pursuing ‘responsible capitalism’ policies, and this is now a well established fact in business. Furthermore, no business, in an international arena, will wish to invest their resources in a country, which Nick Cohen elegantly refers to as, “a pirate state which you visit, rob or be robbed but never to conduct honest business”
The problem is that the custard pie thrown at George Osborne will either miss or it won’t stick. It may be a useful short-term tactic, as argued by Steve Richards today, but it lacks credibility. Ed Balls has vigorously denied it, and Bob Diamond in his evidence yesterday did not play the ‘It’s all Labour’s fault‘ joker. An independent inquiry, led by the judiciary not the legislature essential for legal ‘separation of powers’, is the only way of finding out how a toxic culture can go unnoticed by CEOs of powerful corporates, and why banking is so much for the benefit of its shareholders rather than its customers. We need answers to this – in summary, Ed Miliband is right, and George Osborne is so very wrong.
