Listening to Ed Balls, shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, on the 'Andrew Marr Show' this morning, was like listening to a broken record.
Whingeing on about George Osborne's 'failed' plan for fiscal recovery, Balls did little but spout the usual socialist claptrap: a 'bankers' bonus tax', 'creating jobs', 'millionaires tax cuts' and so on. The one thing that Balls never mentions is his own gross culpability for much of the mess in which we now found ourselves.
The last Labour government, of which Balls was, eventually, a major part, laid the foundation for a large chunk of the current crisis through its policies of high taxation and uncontrolled state spending. Let us not forget that it was Gordon Brown who changed the taxation status of pension funds, depriving many people of vast amounts of money in their old age. It was Gordon Brown who introduced the system of tax credits which now makes it completely pointless for many people to work the basic hours required in order to claim them; It was the Labour government which introduced the minimum wage resulting in small companies often being forced to pay uneconomic wages to lazy and inefficient staff. They did all this and much more while raising every tax within sight, always excepting income tax which they cynically used to signal a supposedly tax-friendly approach towards the poor oppressed population.
For Balls to be complaining that the coalition government has 'failed' to restore balance to the economy after not much more than 2 years in office is an insult to the intelligence; for him to demand a restoration of the catastrophic 'tax and spend' policy of his disastrous government shows an almost unbelievable arrogance and ability to ignore reality. Why anyone would listen to him seriously or, worse still, ever vote for his bunch of failed hypocrites again, I have no idea.
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