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Eighteen months ago Ed Balls, the then shadow chancellor, was preparing for a general election in the expectation that he might soon become the second most powerful person in the government. But Labour was defeated, Balls lost his seat, and today his principle contribution to national life is as a contestant on Strictly. Still, on a relatively quiet day, he’s worth a mention on the Politics Live blog. He has got a memoir to plug, and extracts have already appeared in the Times. He had more to say this morning in an interview with Nick Robinson on the Today programme. Here are the key points.
I’m afraid it’s a great delusion, in a constituency like mine, to think that people who voted Liberal Democrat in 2010 and went to the Conservatives in 2015 did so because they thought Labour was not radical enough. In the end it was a matter of trust on the economy, and whether we would spend the money wisely … The idea [Labour lost] because we weren’t leftwing enough I’m afraid is just a nonsense.
I was making a broader point than just about Jeremy. I was talking about what we are seeing in America in Bernie Sanders, and with Donald Trump – an issue of left and right – and saying it is a complex, difficult world, in which populations are angry, incomes have not risen, people are worried about identity, the globalisation of labour, and there is a tendency for some to peddle a simple solution and say ‘We can just solve the problem, it’s all the fault of the bankers, or immigrants, or a neoliberal conspiracy, or welfare scroungers’. And I don’t think that’s enough.
My advice would be that would be a disastrous thing to do. I think one of the messages of my book is that to walk away from challenges is a mistake.
I would have preferred it if it had been more. I would rather have been on the inside of that strategy … In the era of Brown and Blair, even when their relationship had become difficult, when it came to elections, everybody came together and they were speaking once, more than once, a day. That was not the case in our election campaign.
There are lots of politicians who lose and try and come straight back. But that’s not what I’ve decided to do …. I’m having a good time. We’ll see what happens in the future. But back to politics? I think it’s pretty unlikely.
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Sig Nordal 