Ed Balls is laughing all the way to 11
Downing Street.
Unemployment is allegedly down in the
North East. Where the Conservative Party has privately written off the European
seat held by its Leader in the European Parliament, and (to Labour) both of its
Westminster seats, one of which Labour has never won before.
Anyone would think that the CCHQ boys
knew that these figures were, well, balls. Everyone else certainly does.
If they're "balls" then who do you think is making them up?
ReplyDeleteAs with GDP figures and the recovery in general, you are convinced they are untrue and are sure "everyone" else is (really - everybody in the country regardless of opinion poll evidence to the contrary?) but can't seem to explain how the figures could have been produced without some form of corruption.
No one believes them. That must mean that they cannot chime with anyone's experience.
ReplyDeleteBut that is not quite the point, which is simply that no one believes them, so that no one is going to vote as if they did.
I am right back in my gilded youth. This year is 1996 all over again.
Right back in your gilded youth eh?
ReplyDeleteThen your old enough to remember that Labour's manifesto commitment in 1997 was to match Tory spending plans-pound for pound-for the first two years in office.
New Labour made a song and dance of saying "we've changed...were not going to raise income tax" etc throughout the 97 campaign.
Why would they have made such a fuss of promising not to change Tory spending plans at all for the first two years, if those policies weren't popular and successful?
Oh, all sorts of reasons. I shall be coming back to all of that around the twentieth anniversary of John Smith's death.
ReplyDeleteLabour, as it is now, has made an average gain of nine points at every by-election in this Parliament apart from the one that it lost to George Galloway. Popular and successful, indeed.
It knew it could only win by promising it had changed since the dark old "call-the-IMF" days and wouldn't wreck the economy again with high taxes and high spending.
ReplyDeleteThat's why.
It would have won, no matter what. I shall be coming back to that one.
ReplyDeleteAnd no one in 1997 believed that there was an economic recovery. Most people thought that the figures were faked, and that the Major Government was economically the most incompetent ever, including the Labour Government of the 1970s.
As they regard this one, in fact.
If that was true, Labour would have built its 97 election campaign around changing, not promising publicly to maintain, Tory spending policies.
ReplyDeleteJust like Ed Balls commitment to meet the Coslition target of wiping out the deficit.
Brown didn't have to, and most people do not realise that Balls has.
ReplyDeleteThey probably wouldn't believe it, if they were told. But it didn't matter then, and it doesn't matter now. Labour was always going to win in 1997, and Labour has always been going to win in 2015. No matter what.
Even the C of E bishops in the South now feel the need to keep in with the Labour Party. That speaks many, many volumes.