Ed Balls – from Green Tax Crusader to Jeremy Clarkson
Posted on March 3, 2011Ed Balls has evidently decided that hammering the Coalition on rising fuel duty and the double-tax on fuel through VAT is the right way to go. Politically, it’s a clever choice – the levels of tax faced by motorists are punitively high, it does harm the economy and it means ordinary taxpayers are often punished for making essential trips to work or to the shops – particularly in rural areas.
Essentially, he is shifting – at least partially – into TaxPayers’ Alliance messaging, casting himself as being on the side of the strivers, the strugglers and the just-getting-by. Heck, he even confessed this morning that maybe the previous Government might have wasted some money, an acknowledgement that seems obvious to the rest of us but is a groundshaking revelation when it comes from Balls.
As well as being political good sense, this is also part of a growing decontamination strategy that Labour are pursuing to shed the negative associations of the stealth taxes and squandered billions of 1997-2010.
The question with any decontamination strategy is “Will it work?”
With Ed Balls, you’ve got to wonder if even his powers of self-delusion will succeed this time. Today, he is an opponent for economic and moral reasons of hammering motorists. In his pomp helping to present and defend the Budget back in 2007, though, he was boasting about the ethical worthiness of, erm, hammering motorists:
That is exactly what we have been doing over the past 10 years with action to shift the tax burden from “goods” to “bads”, and with the work that we have done to support and, indeed, to pioneer international emissions control and trading. In the Budget, we have set out further actions to advance the environment agenda, including…a fuel duty increase of more than inflation
Is it really believable that the Ed Balls who spent a decade squeezing and squeezing motorists until the pips squeaked because driving was “bad” has now seen sense and is fighting on the motorists’ side? It’s about as plausible as Jeremy Clarkson being elected as the next leader of the Green Party.
Tags: Budget, Coalition, Deficit, Economics, Ed Balls, Fuel Duty, Green Party, Jeremy Clarkson, Labour, Labour Leadership, opinion, Parliament, Politics, Tax
Categories: Opinion, Politics, Westminster
Labour posing as the friend of the motorist is only slightly more credible than Hitler posing as the friend of the Jews.
14.03.2011 13:59
No.
14.03.2011 14:58
Ed talks a lot of Balls. Trust and Labour don’t belong in the same universe. I’d rather eat my own liver than trust a Labour utterance.
15.03.2011 09:29
The metropolitan liberal cabal, be they Labour, Liberal or the shallow pale Conservatives now in power are failing to understand that the tax on fuel is a massive hindrance to economic growth.
Its all very well for those in London with their “integrated transport infrastructure” what about the rest of the country? We rely on the internal combustion engine & if the Con Dem Governments keep hammering us with taxes to pay for the “gren lie” they will pay a heavy price at the ballot box – guaranteed.
CUT THE TAX ON FUEL NOW!
15.03.2011 09:46
“Green lie” – apologies.
15.03.2011 09:47
watch for Balls £74.50 for petrol appearing on Balls’s next expenses claim. If the kids were in the car it is likely the cost will be applied to another budget or perhaps split to muddy the waters.
Tough being an MP all this and having to deny the deficit too
15.03.2011 10:29
I guess I am still ahead of the curve in that I have already abandoned the tories, as I see no practical difference between the blue-yellow or red parties on tax. They all agree with each other on the climate change disaster and the only right of centre party that values enterprise is now UKIP, I have switched my allegiance to them. I do not see why I should vote Tory to stop labour if I end up with the same “green” taxes as labour, the same deference to the EU as labour and the same politically correct fascism as labour.
It has been worked out (in the USA) as a cost benefit exercise what the cost of green taxes will be per single degree of centigrade reduction for cutting CO2.
The amount of industry we would have to lose, to cut CO2 enough to actually reduce it would be the equivalent of returning to the stone age. Literally. Without a hint of hyperbole or hype, that is the level of reduction we would need.
Thankfully UKIP are opposed to spending our selves into the worst bankruptcy the world has ever known and the greatest backwards step of de-evolution in the history of any species on earth, for the sake of 1 degree of cooling, (which could happen naturally anyway if PDO and NAO cycles continue).
Taking on board the fact that many climate alarmist scientists are genuinely claiming that the only way to avoid catastrophe is to devolve to the equivalent of a stone age, and that no politician on earth is actually going to support that, then the alternative is to only do an amount which would (according to the alarmists) not save us at all, but only bankrupt us on our way to death, then the only logical thing is to do nothing and perish.
Either we go back to the stone age and survive as little more than cavemen, or we tax ourselves to oblivion as the earth fries and we die bankrupt.
Personally, given those options, I would rather do nothing and die in comfort, and risk discovering that the alarmists are wrong and save money doing so.
15.03.2011 10:41
Of all modern politicians, Ed Balls sickens me most. He will say, or do, absolutely anything to get a tactical advantage for himself and his beloved cause. Anyone else, or anything else, or any principles or sense of right and wrong, can go hang. Only Gordon Brown came close in this respect, although Brown did have his much-boasted-about “moral compass” which of course pointed in every direction, depending on which way his poll ratings were going…
Petrol was 65p per litre in 1997. It is double that now. But have everyone’s wages doubled since the beginning of the New Labour era? Many people’s income has barely increased at all, especially those in the private sector. So we’re being punished for being ‘bad’, eh Ed? At least the electorate has spoken and you too got the same treatment last year. I hope you lose your seat in 2015.
15.03.2011 11:10
Give Eds balls a chance – he apparently hasn’ t the information now he is not in controls of the levers of power – so he can’t make any recommendations about what should be done with the economy – and he donesn’t need to thats osbornes job – thats a rough tranlation of balls the bigots strategic overview of the economy yesterday – i.e keep quiet and hope the electorate think he is wise – no surprise then that he is somewhat imprecise about fuel taxes – give the nice man a chance. Not.
15.03.2011 12:00