Recent Westminster Articles

Liam Byrne is going too far with Iain Duncan Smith’s failed programme

by Sunny Hundal     March 18, 2013 at 1:43 pm

If Phil Woolas was Labour’s unprincipled hard-man on immigration, Liam Byrne is their equivalent on welfare.

According to the Guardian, the shadow welfare secretary is planning to tacitly support Iain Duncan Smith on his workfare reforms this Tuesday.

It’s worth emphasising why this is such a ludicrous proposition. The DWP plans to rush through a change the law so it doesn’t have to accept culpability for the way it treated job-seekers (i.e. like shit).

The DWP deliberately didn’t make the rules for these job-seekers clear, so many of them ended up working for free and not knowing their rights. The DWP thought they would get away with it, but now they have been caught – Iain Duncan Smith is trying to cover his arse.

This is a programme that does not work, and is less successful than if these job-seekers were not asked to do anything at all.

This is a programme whose sole purpose is to massage down unemployment figures; simply to subsidises private companies with free labour who would otherwise have to pay those people a full time wage.

We are living in a state where the government thinks these youths are so worthless that it will happily defy the judiciary to retroactively change the law. The judiciary is meant to be a check on state power and to enforce the rule of law, and anyone who gives even a shred for the rule of law or constitutional matters should worry about IDS’ willingness to treat it as irrelevant. He is nothing less than a megalomaniac.

It is more galling that Liam Byrne is endorsing this (by either voting for it, or abstaining – it’s not clear) allowing this to happen. At least Labour’s Future Jobs Fund was more targeted, much more successful in placing people in paying jobs, and did not subsidise the private sector.

Byrne is endorsing a travesty of a programme that goes against everything the Labour party stands for. He is endorsing IDS’s “strivers vs scroungers” rhetoric.

Furthermore, there is a good chance that this act of retroactively changing the law could also be challenged and struck down in court.

It basically says our youth aren’t even worth protecting from abuse when a Conservative govenment breaks the law to exploit them. How can this possibly fit in with Ed Miliband’s ‘One Nation’ agenda? Why legitimise a programme that does not work and only exists for exploitation?

A few weeks ago Labour youth groups said they would not support or canvas for Labour MPs who did not support same sex marriage. I would hope, for the future of our youth, they could consider doing the same with Liam Byrne.

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This article has been updated. See this for an update on Labour’s position.

Who are the real ideologues that will push Labour to a huge defeat?

by Don Paskini     March 15, 2013 at 8:50 am

Dan Hodges attacks “the ideologues of Left and Right” who are “doing their damnedest to pull defeat from the jaws of victory”, by insisting on pure dogma instead of thinking about what the electorate may want.

Reading his piece, I was reminded of one particular group of ideologues.

These people have set out what they call, with all due modesty, “a programme for national renewal”. Like Liam Fox, they think that we currently spend too much money on the NHS. In particular, they have identified that we have far too many hospitals and ought to close some.

They are also keen to tackle the pressing issue of old people keeping their home warm in winter, and the problem of too many pensioners leaving their homes and travelling around on public transport. They therefore plan to means test the winter fuel allowance and remove free bus passes from most pensioners. They’ve also noticed that the government is doing too much to protect pensioners from rising inflation, and that there are too many incentives for people to save money rather than getting into debt. So they’ll end the ‘triple lock’ which guarantees that the state pension won’t wither away, cap ISAs and tax savers more heavily.

They think that the government is spending too much on fighting crime, and too much on educating our children, and so propose to ‘hold down overall public services programme budgets’.

They plan ‘a large-scale broad tax increase’ to squeeze the incomes of people who are struggling to get by, and to keep every single welfare cut implemented by the Tories and reduce the welfare budget still further.

Who are these ideologues? Our old fiscally conservative friends from ‘In the Black Labour’.

Two years on from their original pamphlet, they’ve managed to come up with a policy platform which makes Labour’s 1983 ‘suicide note’ manifesto look like the Beveridge Report.

They refer to this approach as ‘hard realism’, taking ‘tough choices’ and so on. They also worry that opposition from ‘vested interests’, ranging from pensioners’ groups to the Labour Party, would prevent them from being able to take this message to the British people.

It’s easy to take pot shots, and they deserve credit for setting out their stall. But there is nothing particularly ‘hard’ or ‘realistic’ about putting together a wishlist of policy priorities, entirely unconnected from any sense of what is remotely politically feasible. And while it is indeed ‘tough’ to advocate sharp reductions to the living standards of elderly people, I’m not sure that many people would regard being ‘tough on grannies’ as something to boast about.

In opposition, it is all the more important to avoid sweeping pledges which threaten the services which people support most strongly. Promises from politicians are treated with extreme skepticism, and fears are magnified. Far from securing Labour’s credentials as a party prepared to take tough decisions, cutting the NHS and squeezing pensioners would reinforce the notion of a bunch of politicians who are out of touch and who don’t get how tough it is in the real world.

The problem with ‘In the Black Labour’ is not that it will antagonise vested interests who are unprepared to take the hard decisions needed for national renewal. It’s that they’ve fallen into the trap of believing that ideological radicalism is the route to disaster for their opponents, but the route to success for themselves. This is a trap which catches centrist technocrats just as easily as socialist revolutionaries or right-wing Thatcherites.

UKIP wins the xenophobes: breaking down the Eastleigh result

by John B     March 2, 2013 at 6:45 am

You’d need a heart of stone not to laugh at the Eastleigh result. The coalition parties viciously tore strips off each other in the campaign (for a party normally opposed to employee protection laws, the Conservatives are remarkably and creditably concerned about workplace sexual harassment all of a sudden).

The biggest winner, despite only nabbing second place, was a party resembling a mad scientist’s chimera of the Tea Party and the Five Star Movement. The Tories were an dismal failure. And Milibandian Labour continued its trend of doing absolutely nothing exceptional by doing absolutely nothing exceptional.

However, it would be deeply unwise to take the raw numbers from Eastleigh and conclude that David Cameron is buggered, that the Lib Dem vote will hold up at the next election, that anyone really cares very much about Europe, that the Tories need to tack to the right in general, or that Labour can’t win in the South. How do we know all this? Weirdly, thanks to renowned philanthropist and psephologist Lord Ashcroft.

continue reading… »

Lessons for Labour from Eastleigh

by Don Paskini     March 1, 2013 at 2:18 pm

My former boss Andrew Smith, MP for Oxford East, often spoke about the importance of good local campaigning. The aim of this, he argued, was to build strong relationships with the electorate, so that whatever was happening at Westminster or in the newspapers didn’t influence how people chose to vote. Rather than remote politicians having their views filtered through the media to the electorate, this is about local politicians and people working together, while the remote media chatter away in the background.

This isn’t a particularly new insight, but the value of this approach can be seen by the success of the Liberal Democrats in winning the by-election in Eastleigh. While the hundreds of volunteers, thousands of contacts and hundreds of thousands of leaflets over the past three weeks played their part; they actually won the election months ago, when they built their local organisation, made sure that people had a positive view of their local work, gathered the data and set up their delivery networks.

I think the key lessons for Labour from this by-election are not about whether “One Nation Labour” is reaching “southern voters”, or whether Labour needs to adopt policy x, y or z. Instead, the Eastleigh result poses two questions which Labour need to consider:

1. Why did Labour fail, in so many of the seats that we held between 1997 and 2010, to build the kind of local organisation which the Lib Dems have in Eastleigh?
2. How can Labour ensure by the time of the next election they have this level of local organisation in at least, say, 340 constituencies?

Over the past few years, as trust in politicians and politics has fallen, the added value of local campaigning and effective incumbency has risen. Parties which campaign all year round and mobilise volunteers well before an election beat those which wait until the last minute, whatever the national political context.

The value of ‘early intervention’, identifying and sorting out problems early and enabling people to develop their skills and talents, is just as evident in political campaigning as it is in public services. The Tories matched the Lib Dems leaflet for leaflet, door knock for door knock during the short campaign period. But six months, 1 year, 2 years ago, the Lib Dems were active and the other parties weren’t.

Arguably, Labour should have asked its volunteers not to head to Eastleigh, where the impact of their valiant efforts was always going to be minimal, but to Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Kent and other areas which have county council elections in a couple of months.

There’s a key challenge for local councillors here, as well. Voters in Eastleigh generally agreed that the local council was doing a good job, and that the credit for this should go to the Lib Dems. I wonder how many Labour-run authorities are places where people would spontaneously say that their council was doing a good job, let alone attribute this to the Labour Party? That should be a key goal for every Labour councillor.

Getting as many county councillors elected as possible in May is much more important for Labour than their share of the vote in Eastleigh, especially if those councillors are signed up and committed to talking to voters once they are elected, organising locally and building support well ahead of the next General Election. As Eastleigh shows, it is never too early to start getting ready for the next election.

Eastleigh: David Cameron’s worst nightmare has come true

by Sunny Hundal     March 1, 2013 at 7:45 am

Two groups of people had a bad night last night: one group are the pollsters, who predicted that the Conservatives would come a close second. They won’t be crying into their cereal this morning but they will definitely have to look at what went wrong.

But for the Conservatives, and especially David Cameron, this was a nightmare come true. At one point Nigel Farage was on TV complaining that the Tories had split his vote!

This is a problem for them on several levels.

Firstly it confirms the view that the Lib Dem vote has collapsed from their left flank not the right. In Tory-Lib Dem marginals at the general election, Lib Dems now have hope they will retain anti-Tory voters and keep their seats. I think this is likely and have always dismissed suggestions Lib Dems will be ‘wiped out’ at the next election. They will primarily lose seats against Labour – which further compounds Cameron’s difficulties.

The second is the pollster problem. If there is indeed a ‘shy UKIP’ vote that can surge at the last minute, Tories are in more trouble than they thought. The polling may be over-estimating their support.

The third is the internal problem. Lots of Tory MPs will now call (with justification) for Cameron to move to the right and deal with the UKIP problem. They thought the EU Referendum pledge dealt with that. Oh how wrong they were. But Cameron also has to keep his Coalition partners happy, and moving to the right would re-toxify the Tory brand and lose him voters in the centre.

And as Ian Dunt at Politics.co.uk points out:

The message from Eastleigh is precisely the opposite of what backbenchers will demand, but they will demand it anyway. Cameron is now faced with an impossible dilemma – tack right and lose the electorate, or tack to the centre and lose your backbenchers.

This is the nightmare scenario and it has come true. As for Labour, I already pointed out that this shows they haven’t quite understood the anti-Tory vote. They should never have bothered even raising expectations. But this was no great loss for them. The pain will mostly be felt at CCHQ.

[PS: arguably, it was also a bad night for the right-wing press, which had clearly hoped a focus on the sex-harassment allegations would hurt the LibDems. Obviously, I think Channel 4's original investigation was right. It just turned out voters focus on local issues and didn't care much for Daily Mail splashes.]

Labour needs more ‘big policy’, so here are some ideas

by Guest     February 28, 2013 at 10:40 am

by Renie Anjeh

Two weeks ago, Ed Miliband made a speech in Bedford – a must-win seat for Labour – announcing new policies such as a cap on interest rates but most importantly reintroduction of the 10p tax rate funded by a mansion tax. It not only showed whose side Labour is on, but also exposed some truths about the Tories.

It’s no coincidence that Boris Johnson and George Osborne were competing on who can attack the mansion the most vociferously – the Tory leadership race is already kicking off!

Labour needs more ‘big policy moments’ so that people know where Labour stands. Here are some suggestions:

- Free universal childcare for all pre-school children, funded by scrapping higher-rate pension tax relief.

- A million new homes by 2020, funded by pooling the budgets for housebuilding and housing benefit, using that prioritise housebuilding over subsiding rents.

- A cap on energy prices and a windfall tax on the ‘Big Six’ energy companies, used to fund a home-insulation programme.

- An independent Office for Immigration Management, which will advise on policy, report on immigration, launch inquiries and give ‘traffic-light’ signals on immigration.

- A reduction in the cap on tuition fees from £9,000 down to £5,000, funded by ending child benefit for over 16s.

- A National Care Service funded by increasing the age where people stop paying National Insurance from 60 to 70 and replacing inheritance tax with a ‘lifetime gifts’ tax.

- A Jobs Guarantee so that those unemployed for over year would get a ‘living wage’ job for six months, which would funded ending the tax-free lump sum pension entitlement.

- 400 local banks, alongside a new British Investment Bank, which will be created by using 1% of the bank bailout fund.

- A National Salary Insurance scheme so that those who have worked longer get more in their benefits.

- A tax allowance of £25,000 for first-time buyers for homes worth up to £250,000 funded by a new ‘net wealth’ tax.

Let’s just hope Jon Cruddas is reading today.

Heavily invested in sacred cows

by Chris Naden     February 27, 2013 at 11:30 am

This neat piece from Steve Benen reminded me of this longer, but wonderful piece from Jonathan Chait in 2005 on epistemic closure and the remarkable lack of interest, from the right, in evidence-based government.

The New Republic piece is full of quoteable moments, and well worth reading in full, including this on the non-equivalence of the parties;

Part of this difference reflects the cultural predilections of the last two presidents–Bush is the instinctive anti-intellectual who likes to go with his gut, and Clinton is the former Rhodes scholar who relished academic debates. But it also reflects the natural tendencies of conservatism and liberalism.

Clearly, after the 112th Congress and the theatrics of the 2012 Republican primary, Chait’s theme has been much explored since. The rise of the Murdoch-influenced ‘conservative’ press, and its influence on creating an extraordinarily lucrative rage market for Limbaugh, Beck and company; the disturbing elevation of Paul Ryan and his numberless economics; Sarah Palin; and the radicalising effect of two cycles of TEA-Party politics in the House and in State Houses across the country have all washed the GOP further from their old moorings on the shores of reality. Here’s J. Bernstein in 2011:

No, the difference between the parties is how well party dogma is aligned with reality. [..] Republicans are required to be sceptical of evolution, to deny climate change, pretend missile defense works, and otherwise ignore real-world evidence. [...] a lot of GOP policy positions [are] “conservative” in the sense of being aligned with what Rush or Beck says, but not in the sense of being aligned with ideological conservatism.

Which got me thinking about the UK. There are certainly ideological factions in parliament. British government has clearly been divorced from any great emphasis on evidential policy for some time. But in the same way that the GOP has become an echo-chamber of dog-whistles and plutocratic catechisms, rather than becoming an ideologically conservative policy actor, the UK scene is ignoring evidence not so much for reasons of ideology as for reasons of faith and habit.

One cannot overestimate the power of habit in British politics; which is mostly a Sir. Humphrey-ish artefact of the professional civil service. It is amplified in the echo chambers of the tabloid press. The Sun, the Mail and their ilk exist, like Limbaugh and the departed Breitbart, to serve a market in fear and rage. Several, in fact; for example, the under-educated working class rage is mostly in the Sun, the educated middle-class rage is mostly in the Mail. Humans are habit-forming and change resistant, older humans are more so, and thus change can be easily presented in a manner which will induce fear and rage in a lucrative and electorally effective demographic.

Then we come to faith. Both major parties have significant and strident minority membership from the wing-nut end of socially conservative Christianity, but that’s not really one of the core articles of faith which have been so damaging. Both major parties also have a religious faith in the free market fundamentalism of the Great Moderation. Both have been captured by financial vested interests. Both have nailed their trousers to the mast on Austerian fantasies and will find it very difficult to climb down.

Both major parties are instinctively authoritarian, and with the triumph of the Orange Book faction of the Liberal Democrats, they’re not much better. Both major parties (since the New Labour course change) are reflexively, rather than in any real sense ideologically, right of centre. Once again, the Liberal Democrats aren’t much better. It should be noted that this matters relatively little as the Coalition may prove to have done more damage to the LibDems than 1983 did.

That British government is no longer moored to evidentiary standards of reality is visible in a number of very high profile incidents. The Dodgy Dossier, for one. The Nutt Sack affair. Public-Private Partnerships. ATOS. Faith schools. The entire Broken Britain narrative, which I have ranted about before. Ridiculous rhetoric on immigration. And in probably the most egregious example currently going, George Osborne’s economic policies.

Both major parties, and to a lesser extent the LibDems front bench, are heavily invested in sacred cows. That’s not a good way to run a country.

More questions about Maria Hutchings’s CV [updated]

by Unity     February 26, 2013 at 12:28 pm

Political Scrapbook has revealed this morning that, despite presenting herself as an experienced business woman, Eastleigh Tory candidate Maria Hutchings has never been a director of a limited company.

But there’s more – this is Hutchings’ current Linkedin profile:

Company and Internet searches for ‘Panacea Marketing and Communications’, the ‘business’ for which Hutchings has ostensibly been working for the last nine years have, so far, turned up absolutely nothing.

Not company registration. No website. No email addresses and no references to any such business anywhere on the internet.

Nothing. Nowt, Zip. Nada. Fuck all.

[UPDATE: To clear up one point from comments, I can find nothing to connect either Maria Hutchings or 'Panacea Marketing and Communications' with the similarly named Panacea Marketing Ltd, which is based in Warwickshire and which most certainly is a genuine company with its own company registration, website, etc. Unless documentary to the contrary emerges it sees safe to say that Hutchings does not appear to have any connection with Panacea Marketing Ltd whatsoever.]

[UPDATE 15:00 - Oliver Duggan (Hutchings sandbagged Tony Blair on national TV, as Equazen are/were in the fish oil supplements business. According to Skeptical Voter, Hutchings did get her face into the papers – well, the Daily Mail – way back in 2006, with claims that Fish Oil supplements had improved her son’s autism. This doesn’t appear to have helped Potters Ltd, the company behind the Equazen brand in the UK, very much as both it and Equazen UK Ltd are currently listed as ‘non-trading’ and the registration on the Equazen website, which is still going, is currently held by a German company.]

However, and this is much more interesting, Hutchings’ current ‘employer’, Anglo Scottish Employer Benefits Ltd is a new business, which was only registered in June 2012, so there is as yet no financial information for this company or any details of its trading activity.

Anglo Scottish Employer Benefits Ltd has the same registered office address as another company with a very similar name, Anglo Scottish Employee Benefits Ltd – both operate from Highfield Lodge, Burlesden.

Anglo Scottish Employee Benefits Ltd, was first registered in 2006 but company records show it to be a non-trading company. In fact, those same records show that company has never traded since it was first registered.

Both companies have the same two directors/shareholders – John Alexander Gordon Milne (age 77) and John Milne (age 43) which rather suggests that they’re father and son.

And, by what I am sure is nothing more than a complete and utter coincidence, the name of the Chairman of the Eastleigh Conservative Association, as of this article about Chris Huhne’s speeding ticket problems in May 2011 is…

Writing in Eastleigh News, John Milne – the Conservative Party Chairman for Eastleigh- speculated that Mr Huhne was only waiting for his first anniversary as a secretary of state to pass before resigning as this would enable him to leave with a ministerial pension.

In which case it seems reasonable to ask whether Anglo Scottish Employers Benefits Ltd is actually a trading company, given that Maria Hutchings currently claims on her Linkedin profile that she works for the company as its ‘Commercial Director’.

[UPDATE]

Well this is getting even more interesting…

As you can clearly see from her LinkedIn profile, Hutchings cites October 2012 as the start of her ‘employment’ with Anglo Scottish Employers Benefits Ltd.

See if you can guess when the domain name for Hutchings’ campaign website was registered before you scroll any further…?

Sex, lies and Liberal Democrats: What I knew about what happened

by Ellie Cumbo     February 25, 2013 at 8:50 am

For 11 months from September 2006, I was the day-to-day organiser of the Lib Dem Campaign for Gender Balance, the party’s internal initiative to mentor, train and network female would-be candidates for Parliament.

Though managed by Jo Swinson MP, I was actually based in the party headquarters, my desk sandwiched between those of the Candidates and Campaigns teams, on the floor above the office of the then Chief Executive, Chris Rennard.

In my own life, these were important months. Galvanised into membership as a student by the heat of my opposition to the Iraq war and plans for 92-days detention, it was only when working right next to them that I saw how much else was missing that I also cared about- like class, redistribution and solidarity. Oh, and actually taking women’s under-representation seriously enough to do something about it that might work.

And it was also during this time that inappropriate sexual touching by Chris Rennard of Alison Smith was alleged to have taken place. I don’t now remember where I first heard about it, but I do remember the phone call when Jo told me she had spoken to Alison herself, and that the information had been passed to Paul Burstow, the Chief Whip. And I know that key members of staff at Lib Dem HQ were also aware of all this.

Naïve as it now sounds, I believed it was being dealt with, and that what I had to do was make sure Alison knew she would still get the campaign’s help if she chose to look for another seat. I left shortly afterwards, to become a law student and a Labour activist – things I now struggle to remember a life without.

Almost six years later, I was emailed by a researcher from Firecrest Films, who said she wanted to talk to me about “a possible short film looking at gender balance in political parties”. I could not have been more thrilled: the level of women’s representation in our Parliament is both embarrassing and damaging to sound policy, and cannot be fixed alone.

I wanted to talk about liberal ideology and its innate misunderstanding of positive discrimination, and the more prosaic issue of complacent local party officers who pay zero attention to the diversity of their membership until longlisting day. And yes- I wanted to talk about the questionable attitudes that some male politicians – in all parties- have towards young women.

But, of course, this wasn’t actually the purpose of the meeting at all. As I wittered on about shortlisting quotas and the great I Am Not a Token Woman scandal of ’01, it was impossible to miss the recurring theme of her questions. Those training events that in my view focused on the wrong aspects of what it takes to be a candidate- did, erm, did Chris Rennard usually come along? And did he stay over? Not even my hilarious Lembit Opik anecdote could throw her off.

So I adjusted my expectations, and told her what I knew. And having learned that, as far as we can tell, nothing was done about the allegations, I am wholly supportive of the Channel 4 investigation and the mounting pressure on the party leadership to explain who decided what.

What worries me now is that, as the coverage ramps up and up, and becomes increasingly politicised, we risk taking our eye off the wider issue of culture in all our political parties. Sexual harassment is hard to report anywhere- but it’s borderline impossible in a world where success means avoiding embarrassment at all costs, where new recruits can expect to be tested on their loyalty at least as much as their talent, and where employment rights don’t exist, because candidates are not employees.

There are answers to be developed here – from a cross-party protocol for handling allegations of candidate mistreatment, to opening up the remit of the existing Parliamentary regulators – but this won’t happen if scrutiny gives way to scandal. The commentators- from both politics and the media- must not look solely what was done, but about what will be done differently in future. And, in case any researchers want to hear my Lembit Opik story – I still think that short film on gender balance is a good idea.

The case against Ed Balls as shadow chancellor

by Sunny Hundal     February 22, 2013 at 12:51 pm

Late last year I was invited to Christmas drinks at Ed Balls in Westminster, along with other bloggers and lobby journalists. It wasn’t a swanky affair – held in his small office in Portcullis House – and Cameron had decided to hold his drinks on the same evening so it wasn’t a big throng either. I rarely get a chance to ask him questions so I decided to say hello just before Mr Balls left for the night. Roughly, this is how our brief conversation went.

I said: Hi Ed, Labour has been criticised by many, including myself, for not going far enough on financial reform as all we’ve done is signed up to the watered-down Vickers Report (same policy as the Conservatives). Don’t you think Labour should be doing more to break up and tackle banks that are ‘too big to fail’?

Ed B replied: Well, we are always going to have some banks that are too big to fail – you cannot avoid that. What we are doing is trying to ensure there is separation between casino banking and retail banking, and that banks have enough capital kept as collateral so they are more insulated from shocks.

This response agitated me. Neither of those conditions would prevent another financial collapse (Lehman Bros was entirely an investment bank) and this was exactly what the Conservatives said they were doing. We were copying them.

I replied: Ok, let me put it another way. We both agree we need more competition in the banking sector to ensure there isn’t an oligopoly of big banks that have most of the market. That would also reduce risk making it less likely that we have to bail out banks. So what are we doing to encourage more competition in the banking sector?

Ed Balls replied: Good question Sunny, good question. I have to go now but we’ll have to come back to that discussion.

And that was it.

I was gob-smacked. It wasn’t clear how Labour was proposing to be any different to the Conservatives on financial reform, and show how it had learnt from previous mistakes. If the banks collapsed again under a Labour government in 2018 we would have a credit crunch and a bail-out all over again.

I say this because the publication of Anthony Sheldon’s letter in the New Statesman – and responses by Mark Ferguson and Jonathan Freedland – have raised the question of whether Ed Balls should remain the Shadow Chancellor going into the 2015 election. I’m sure he will, but I don’t think he should.

To make my point a different way I want to ask a question of fellow Labour party members. Let’s say you meet a voter on the street and she asks: “what are Labour’s plans to create over a million meaningful jobs (not workfare ‘jobs’) and what has Labour learnt from the financial crash” – how would you respond? I suspect most of you would struggle to respond. I would struggle to respond. I bet even the Fabians and IPPR would struggle to respond.

That is because the Labour party has no clear answer yet. During the Labour leadership election Mr Balls gave a speech at Bloomberg that was widely applauded because it argued that austerity would hurt the economy as it would bleed a patient when it was ill. He was echoing what many of us on the Left had been saying – and we have all been proven right.

But the problem is that since then Mr Balls has become extremely timid and scared of being labelled a ‘deficit denier’. The entire shadow cabinet has been barred from talking about any policy that would require spending money. Mr Balls himself talks about the need to make cuts but never about the need to borrow cheap money from the financial markets and stimulate the economy – as any sensible economist would advocate now.

Similarly, there is no talk of major financial reform at all. We have some tinkering – which even the Conservatives are happy to support – and a National Investment Bank. He won’t even commit to the Robinhood Tax on financial speculation.

It’s understandable that Labourites don’t want a civil war going into 2015; the hunger to defeat the Conservatives is too strong. But what are we fighting for when we have little to say on the two biggest issues of our generation? Ed Balls is likely preparing to sign up to Conservative austerity plans past 2015. Are we going to convince voters we have changed and offer a clear alternative simply by offering to cut spending slightly differently?

Mr Balls does have a lot of critics within the Labour party. Lord Glasman warned of Ed Balls’ timidity over a year ago; many in the trade unions too haven’t forgotten his appeal to fiscal conservatives with a 1% public sector pay freeze pledge. They are silent because they want to ensure we don’t distract from the Coalition’s failures. But we need to have a debate about Ed Balls’ timidity now rather than six months before an election. We should be asking now about Labour’s big policies that match Ed Miliband’s speech last week.

We cannot carry on pretending Labour can create meaningful jobs, have a more responsible capitalism and cut inequality without serious financial reform. The case against Ed Balls isn’t that he is too tainted by the last administration, but that he remains a City-friendly technocrat who is unwilling to push the bold ideas the British economy needs.