Deja Vu all over again

I was reminded this week when shadow chancellor Ed Balls, promising that if Labour are elected to government at next general election they will take Winter Fuel payments away from some pensioners as part of a policy of "iron discipline", and stick to the coalition government's spending plans for at least their first year in office, of the last Labour shadow chancellor who made almost exactly the equivalent promises.

That's right: it was Gordon Brown who promised "prudence," strict financial discipline, and to stick to Kenneth Clarke's spending plans. Look how that eventually turned out.

One might have been tempted to describe Ed Balls as the coalition's secret weapon. As Michael Gove recently wrote in the Telegraph,

"Ed Balls responds to every development in the same way – let’s party like it’s 1929. He wants to enlist us all in sponsoring a revival of his one-man show, “Gordon Brown 2 – Return to the Edge of Bankruptcy”, the original of which gave Britain a massive structural deficit, spiralling unemployment and declining competitiveness."

However, Ed Miliband has a strong claim himself to be so considered. As Michael Gove wrote in the same article, Miliband “is as clearly defined as a blancmange in a hurricane”.

Referring to Miliband's attendence at Google’s Big Tent conference, Gove added

"There, he gave a lecture on business ethics that held up Willy Wonka as the model of a successful modern entrepreneur and attacked Montgomery Burns – a character from The Simpsons – as a representative of the predatory capitalism that is our biggest contemporary problem.

With less than two years before the general election, the Opposition has so little of weight to say that it makes a hole in the air seem substantial."

You can read the Michael Gove article in full here.

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