Sorry, it took a second. Have figured out point of article. There hasn't been a labour surrender Owen. There is just the policies and economic plan Labour have always had. Owen, if what you mean is 'I am sorry for colluding with the disenfranchisement of those in my book'- then say so. This naiive frustration at a capitulation that hasn't happened, because it colours your very young and rosy view of things is getting tired. Is increasingly difficult to tell the difference between well meaning naivety and deliberately obfuscating the truth.

If Balls didnt mean it, he would have made that plain by now. Yet I see and hear no painstaking, vigorous clarification, thus Balls and Milibland are happy to position Labour as Tory-lite, a somewhat crowded option these days.

MichelleG is right - the country is crying out for a straight-forward, unashamed social democratic alternative, proclaimed with anger at the destruction now being wrought on the foundations of civil society. Please, spare the usual Labour-failed-socialism-failed tripe; anyone with a scrap of sense knows that the Blair regime was a pro-corporate, pro-City copout during which a gaggle of City/banking advisors muttered incessantly in Blair's and Brown's ears, resulting in the UK's portion of the 2008 global banking clusterf**k.

Balls and Milibland's current round of posturing is merely evidence of their hankering after the good old days, hence the yearning to appear credible. Question is, credible to who?

Reading articles about Labour's attempts to regain credibility about their economic competence or their general appeal to the public are interesting I suppose, but it would be better to spend your time thinking of new ways to rebalance society and the economy. To persist with a political system where the 3 main parties are all very similar is much the same as choosing between Persil, Ariel or Bold. If you prefer, you could compare them to 3 firms of cowboy builders as they all have a track record of bodging. The previous Tory government cocked up the economy, but by winning the 1992 election they were able to spend the next 5 years repairing the damage they had wrought upon the nation at great human cost. Had Kinnock won that election, Labour would have embarked on a very similar economic programme to that pursued by the Tories under Major. Either way the economic models they use are a "spot the difference" competition where there are no differences. So what's the alternative? My Vote For Yourself campaign proposes that policy is decided by the public using the Internet to allow everyone to vote on everything. The public might decide that it would be better to spend their own money on building solar panel factories all over the country rather than on new nuclear power stations. You could train thousands of unemployed people to install them on every roof thereby creating employment and reducing energy costs for ordinary people in a sustainable way. The idea that only people who have gone to Oxbridge, where they are taught the same ideas, have the ability to make these decisions is absurd. Real people living in the real world know what the real priorities are. To grab some headlines by endorsing the new high speed rail investment and introduce another debate to distract everyone from what's actually going on is masterful spin, but the time scale involved makes the debate meaningless. We need immediate public capital spending to boost the economy hence my view that the public should decide how their money should be spent. Of course, when you go down the V4Y road you won't need politicians any more.

"George Osborne will borrow more than Alistair Darling's plan, so derided by the Tories at the last general election".

I'm sick of journalists comparing Osborne's and Darling's plans. Osborne might be making a mess of the economy (though perhaps crucially not according to the ratings agencies), but Darling's economic forecast was of its time. The financial situation has changed and worsened significantly (again) since then, so it is no longer relevant. Under present circumstances Darling would surely have had to spend and borrow above and beyond that plan.

Labour are currently self-destructing. They don't have a coheret argument on anything. I know that the next election is still a long way away, but first impressions are all important...

Ed Balls is responsible for our economic situation, so it's about time he started taking some responsibility.

This country has become like the USA where all the main parties are in pockets of corporate greed and their reason for existence is to hammer the poor. Ed Miliband's 'new generation' is shown as one big sham. It is New Labour in a different suit. We have no opposition in this country.

"If a broad coalition of Labour activists and trade unions united around a coherent alternative and put concerted pressure on the leadership, this surrender can be stopped in its tracks."
But you can't unite around a cherent alternative, because you don't have one.

Labour has moved into line with the Coalition, Europe and US. Growth is going to be as rare as hen's teeth; the credit rating agencies are corralling everyone into austerity; investment is going to drop; trade will drop; the deficits will increase bla, bla, bla...

The Eurozone has an excuse because of the myopic policies of the ECB and Germany. The UK and US are volunteering for depression when they control their own interest rates, their own money supply and their own central banks.

As for the public - they don't understand. They've been duped by the emphasis on debt and the deficit.

How you get growth when unemployment is increasing remains one of the mysteries of the prevailing orthodoxy. Also, the depressive policies of the UK, US and the Eurozone cannot do anything but make things worse. It's a perfect disaster in the making.

I know Ethnic minority cops ,who on the basis of The last gov't going back on it's word of giving the police the pay rise they were due and not, Then voted for the tories despite the tores saying the Police were going to get a 2 year pay freez,e so criticizing labour over accpeting the pay freeze is hardly a sign of weakness,in fact uit's the honesty of the matter that's mre ot blame for laobur having to accpet teh country is broke, being a start ,rather than a disaster

@Markus

If anyone needs to get a grip, it is you. The "taxpayers alliance" is - by any reasonable standard - hard right; certainly the BNP are even further to the right, but then, whatever they may claim, they have neo-fascist antecedents.

The reason the country is in a mess is because of the catastrophically failed neoliberal economic policies introduced by the Tories, and which New Labour failed to reverse. Simply implementing more of the same is just going plunge the country still further into the shit - as the present crassly incompetent Tory administration is demonstrating all too clearly.

Lasciate ogne speranza

Here's a quote from Ed B's speech:

"With growth stagnating around the world, every country pressing ahead
with deep cuts risks being a catastrophic mistake.

Which is why Ed Miliband and I have argued for a global plan for
growth, with clear medium-term plans to get deficits down, but
stimulus now to avoid a global slump too."

That's just about the opposite of what is reported in the article.

So who's right? Did he say what he said, or did he say what Owen Jones thinks he said?

a leopard does not change its spots, ed is playing the bullshit game, if he was really serious he would create a framework to bind all governments to running budget surpluses when we grow at trend which would allow us to spend the war chest on infrastructure when we are in recession.

but he ain't ever going to do that nor is any other party for that matter. that's what we need though to run this country properly on a sound basis.

Well at least it answers the independence question. It will be a definitive yes from me.

Owen Jones - SHUT UP!
Whingeing is just making things worse! I take it you want Labour to be in office, I suspect you probably want to be a Labour MP, but the simple point being made is that we cannot reverse all the cuts, we will have to cut because the Tories have increased the deficit. I think Ed Balls should think a strategy to ensure that the public sector pay freeze will be reversed by 2020, but just realize that we will not win if we aren't honest about the reality of the economic situation we are.
Also, please be quiet about welfare reform! Liam Byrne is not renewing attacks on welfare - that is just idiocy!

Owen Jones is completely right.
The Mambo have blogged on this here:

http://representingthemambo.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/so-what-did-ed-ball...

Sorry, I wrote Alistair Darling by mistake. I meant to write Alistair Campbell.

The kind of state/capitalist system we enjoy is fine, up to a point, then when the bubble bursts, things go very wrong indeed and one ends in a depression, like the one we've gotten into today, which in the worst hit countries is probably worse than the Great Depression.

I don't know of a single historic example of a state getting out of an economic depression by cutting demand and creating unemployment. This is a kind of scorched-earth policy, economics for the lobotomised, in the dogmatic belief that somehow, someday, green shoots will grow out of the ashes; but one only creates a desert.

Cutting government spending and creating unemployment, was certainly not the way the last Great Depression was brought to an end, on the contrary. That bleed the patient to save him was tried in the 1930's and failed miserably.

Finally the state was forced, as the old, realistic, credible, solutions were not working, to step in and save the market from itself, do what the markets were incapable of doing, create jobs and demand, in other words, growth. This is all pretty elementary economic history and documented, so it's truly amazing and depressing that the current UK leadership is pursuing the opposite strategy, the strategy of permanent recession.

Another view, which still shows that cuts don't work, is that the Great Depression wasn't ended by following Keynes' original plan at all to revive the economy, but needed a far, far, bigger stimulus, and that stimulus was... World War Two, without which we'd possibly still be mired in the Great Depression, but I don't suppose we want to go down that particular road again, as it's a rather drastic solution to depression.

Can the present mess in the country have anything to do with the hundreds of thousands of uneducated third world immigrants allowed into the uk every year by Tony the phony Blair and his labour stooges for a life on welfare benefits in exchange for votes?

Note to editor: Think the headline has typo, surely it should read "Ed Balls is a political disaster" Thanks

i have to get my sick bag out when middle class university educated marxist lefty owen jones sucks up to john majors ex shagger edwina currie on stephen nolans phone in,,this love in they have justs proves to me that new labours and the torys are just 2 cheeks of the same backside,,why is there never any working people on stephen nolans show who can challenge the likes of that disgusting edwina currie,,get ian bone from class war on 5 live and get rid of that middle class lefty owen jones.

Oh dear. Another person that hasn't actually read Balls' speech to the Fabian Society.

http://labourlist.org/2012/01/ed-balls-speech-to-the-fabian-society/

He's against many of the cuts (but not all) and will argue against them. The only thing he *has* announced is there will be no pledges to reverse specific cuts three years ahead of the general election.

But deficit spending there will be, but only to Labour's priorities, which will only be determined nearer the election.

All in good time.

@Hal
It doesn't matter what Balls actually said in his speech, it was what he was heard to say. If anything, it indicates poor speech writing?

Nah! financial reality is now different to what it was, so policy has to be different. Tories have destroyed any chance of growth so there is nothing left to do but cut.

Never mind twitter.

Whenever you have a very long post, you can bet your life it is crap. Yes, it is. A broad coalition of Labour activists,(that's teachers, isn't it?), and trade unions! My that will strike fear in many a Tory breast. Mark Serwotka and Christine Blower - names to conjure with!