Ed Balls' spending plans: A Balls up?

By David Higgerson on Sep 21, 09 03:11 PM

ED BALLS and Gordon Brown as supposed to be as thick as thieves - yet they also appear to be at polar opposites on the issue of cuts.

Last week, Brown told the TUC there would have to be cuts - he used the C word indeed! - but promised to protect jobs and frontline services. It was a speech which should have handed him a bit more control in determining the public spending playing field on which the next election will probably be fought.

Then up pops Balls, offering up £2billion of savings - and instantly identifying a cull of senior teachers as a way of doing it.

What I found fascinating about Balls' comments were that they explicitly revealed that he had senior teaching staff in his firing line. This wasn't some off-the-record interpretation by a journalist at the Sunday Times - he actually said the words himself.

And to offer up 2,000 jobs in the public sector just like that surely flies in the fact of what Brown tried to do last week?

Is this Balls trying to force his colleagues into line to make them announce their cuts, making the unavoidable, well, unavoidable? Or is it just Labour's left hand struggling to understand the right hand?

Whichever it proves to be, surely education is the last area to attack - especially as many will simply see it as Labour pushing the cuts out to the frontline while leaving the bloated middle as it is.

It doesn't seem to make sense.