“People have to vote for me for who I am, rather than who I’m not”: The Ed Balls interview

Ed Balls is the shadow schools secretary and a candidate in the Labour leadership election. He met Mark Ferguson on Tuesday, August 31st, 2010.

You wrote an article for LabourList this week on your housing plan, although some of your other comments in the article have had more attention. You’ve identified building 100,000 new homes as a means of stimulating the economy. Do you think that’s the best use of £6 billion?
On your first point, it’s important to challenge the media and not just to slip into a lazy view that this is only about personalities or a small number of candidates. Sometimes you have people say, “you’re behind in the voting”, and you have to say “hang on a second, nobody has voted at all yet”, and I think lots of Labour Party members around the country want to know that we’re not falling into the personality traps of the election campaign, but that we’re actually getting down to the substance. So we did challenge people on that in the article, and I think that’s the right thing to do, to ask all of us the difficult questions like you’ve just done on the issues which actually matter to Labour Party members: jobs, housing, who can take the argument to the Conservatives on the substance. Nobody has once said to me, as a voting member of the public “how is Peter Mandelson going to be voting?” or “do you think David Miliband or Ed Miliband are more or less in line with the New Labour legacy?” Nobody would know what you were talking about – but they do say “my daughter has been waiting for a house for two years, what are you doing about it?”

The times when Labour Party members nod in the meetings we’re doing around the country are the times when you say “on the doorstep, in the meetings, in the election campaign, people said ‘I’ve always been Labour, but you’re all the same; I’ve always been Labour, but I don’t think you’ve stood up for us; it’s all very well saying you’re doing the right things, but you’ve made it harder for our children to go to university; I’m really worried about what’s happening on the economy, and what the coalition are saying, but what’s Labour going to do?'”. Those things are what people really want answers to.

In answer to the second part of your question, if you look at Australia in the last downturn, it avoided a recession at all, partly because it had a substantial boost in housing investment during the downturn. The last time we had this kind of financial crisis, in 1929 – where the financial system and the private sector got into a crisis of confidence – John Maynard Keynes wrote his famous ‘General Theory’, in which he said “you should pay men to dig holes and fill them in again” because that’s the way to get the economy moving. That’s not the most constructive thing to be doing, but you could see his point – that it’s better to be employing people in the private sector to build new schools which will last fifty years, or to build new housing when you’ve got a big housing crisis. And I think people want to know in the Labour Party and in the wider country whether there’s an alternative on the economy, and whether we as a party have a plan that adds up and allows us to reconnect on the doorstep. Building 100,000 affordable homes is the opposite of what George Osborne is saying. I think we can show this is sensible, that it adds up and that it’s a good use of public money. The estimates are that it will create 750,000 jobs, and a big social return because there’s such a shortage of affordable housing. But it also is what Labour needs to do, so that on the doorstep people say “you’re doing what we want and you’re on our side.” So it’s definitely good value for money.

You spent years working for the Financial Times and then in the Treasury, but the opportunity never arose, as such, for you to get into the Treasury as chancellor. If you’re unsuccessful in this leadership campaign, surely you’d have a very strong claim to be shadow chancellor?
That’s a premise I’m not accepting. I think this is still open and I’m fighting to win. I want to persuade people that if you don’t want to be caught in this two-way trap, and you actually think you want to vote for someone who could really win the election and be different from David Cameron and Nick Clegg, then give me your first preference. People are thinking: “we’re not going to be told how to vote.” But I’ll accept the result as it comes, and I’ll be loyal to whoever wins. I think the important thing is – the lesson you learn is – that the best people should be in the best jobs.

That seems fair enough. You did say to the Financial Times this week, though, that there might not be enough time for you. Do you think there’s enough momentum behind your campaign?
Lots of people will think we’ve got momentum, because of what we did last Friday on the economy, what we did on housing this week – but also what we’ve done over a couple of months. I’ve said I believe in a Labour link with the trade unions, but I’ve demonstrated what that means in practice by travelling all around the country with the CWU doing event after event where we’ve had lots of people coming out to campaign to keep the post office public. If you go out and fight the argument hard and well, you can win the intellectual and the public argument against the coalition policies – and look what’s happened to Michael Gove’s standing in the polls. So we’ve definitely had momentum, we’ve had successes, yes. But I also know that when we started this election in May, there was a question in parliament: is Ed Balls too close to Gordon Brown, and is that a problem for us? We’d just fought an election where Gordon Brown lost, and people asked whether electing someone close to him would cause us a problem. Also, people know that the Conservative press have given me a harder time – a much harder time – than the other candidates. David Cameron has gone for me much more than the other candidates. I was in a meeting a week ago in the north-east and somebody said “I think you’re making the right arguments, and I think you’ve got the better track record on campaigning, but can we really have a Labour leader who’s not supported by the right-wing press? If you’re unpopular with the Daily Mail isn’t that a problem for Labour? Don’t we need to choose someone the right-wing press can support?” Everybody else in the room looked at him with incredulity, because surely the lesson of the past ten years is that if you tilt towards the right-wing press in your politics it ends up with Labour voter saying, “you’re not on our side and you’re all the same”. The reason the Daily Mail calls me “an extreme left-wing socialist zealot” is because they don’t like the fact that I make the case against some of the things that Conservatives support, and because I make the case for a Labour view. But I personally think that’s a badge of honour, not a sign of a problem.

You mentioned there the sense that you were very close to Gordon Brown, but Ed Miliband is pretty close to Gordon Brown as well. Do you sometimes resent that, perhaps, he’s not been seen as so closely associated to him? Perhaps he has pivoted away or perhaps it’s just something more nebulous in the public consciousness?
I think if you spend your life worrying about things or resenting things then you get into difficulty. I’ve always been an optimist, and a positive person. I look forward. I’ve taken far more hits than any other candidate by a factor of probably a hundred, in terms of anonymous briefings to the newspapers. Not all from the Conservative side, but that’s life and if you spend your life worrying about it then I don’t think you do your job well. The fact is that Ed was working with Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman when I arrived in 1993, so he was actually there before me. He was the person who was Gordon’s policy co-ordinator in the Cabinet Office in 2007 and who wrote Gordon’s manifesto. But at the same time, on the big issues of the last decade, Bank of England independence or some of the difficult issues like the Euro, like public service reform, I was the person at the forefront of those arguments – so it’s inevitable that I’m the one who attracts more attention from people who want to have a go. I also think that, in the past two or three years, had Gordon ever thought there was a better person to lead the Labour Party, he’d have stood aside. If the polls had ever suggested that was the case, I think other people would have said to him to stand aside. The view I took, the view Peter Mandelson took – and the view some others took – was that we were never in that position. If you’re in a position where you’ve got a Labour leader and you think he’s the right person for the job or there’s no better alternative, then it was always my view that the loyal and the right thing to do at times of pressure is to go out there and make the case. For that reason, I was seen more than the others as a person who went out and defended Gordon. I’ll never regret that for a minute. Maybe that means that in the first weeks after the general election campaign people said “Ed Balls – closer to Gordon”. I think Labour history will show Gordon to have made some really big calls on the economy, as well as being a great Chancellor, even though he had some issues and made some mistakes which caused him damage as well. I’ve had more disagreements with Gordon Brown than Tony Blair in the last twelve years, but we were always on the same side. I don’t have any regrets, and I can look at myself in the mirror.

You’ve picked up the support of several MPs since close of nominations. What, if anything, is your pitch to them? What is the Ed Balls sell?
The first thing to say is that we’d done much less organisation than the others and moved more slowly during the first weeks of May. We got to 33 nominations ten days before the deadline. At the point we got to 33 we pulled away, and we said to a number of people, like Kate [Green], like Nia [Griffiths], that we knew they would ultimately support me, but they would be nominating other candidates. So we already knew that some people would come forward. Ian David and Michael Connarty have subsequently come to us, rather than the other way round. I haven’t done a big push. Maybe I should have done, but I’ve not been. We’ve been pretty focussed on the policy and the political arguments with the Conservatives and Liberals, rather than doing a big canvass. Where we have, I can’t say that I’m the “not” candidate: Diane Abbott is “not the person who was in the cabinet”. Andy can say “I’m not one of the three people who worked for Tony Blair or Gordon Brown”. When Ed says “I want to turn the page, I’m a change candidate,” he obviously is saying he’s a change from what came before – as you were saying before, there’s a bit more of a swerve in that manoeuvre.

From my point of view, I can’t say I’m a “not” candidate. People have to vote for me for who I am, rather than who I’m not. I can only persuade people by saying “if you want someone who has shown and demonstrated that they can actually take the arguments on in the press and in parliament and win against the Conservatives and the Liberals, I’ve done that. If you want someone who can win the argument and fight the argument on the biggest issue of this parliament by far, which is the economy – well I’ve been doing that in the last few of weeks in a way that the others haven’t.” But also, I can say that the Tories and the newspapers have tried to knock me down and they’ve failed. The others haven’t been tested yet in that arena, and I’m also somebody who people know can fight and win a marginal campaign. I know what it’s like to stand up in a public meeting of 400 people and fight out an argument, because that’s what I had to do in the general election. You don’t have to do that in the same way if you’ve got a large majority. So those would be the things we talk about.

In the end the Labour Party has got to decide if it is choosing a leader for the future or whether it is choosing its leader based upon the past. The thing that’s worried me in the past few days is that the election has been very backward looking. There’s one approach which says “I am the change” and then spends the whole time explaining what the change is from, rather than to. I have said: let’s talk about what we need to change to, and I’ve talked about the economy and housing and public services. I think that’s actually more difficult but it’s a better place for the Labour Party to go.

You’ve mentioned taking the attack to the government – are you a fantastic shadow, is Michael Gove an awful minister, or is it a combination of the two?
Michael has discovered that being in government is harder than being in opposition, because in opposition you can read out your text, you can perform to the gallery, you can get glowing reports from the sketch writer of the Times and the leader writer of the Spectator, but you’re not judged on anything else. Whereas when it comes to government, you’ve actually got to answer the questions, and I don’t think Michael Gove has answered a single question from anyone in the last four months. And that shows. You’ve also got to be on top of your brief and he’s not, and that shows. If you rush to do legislation and it’s not watertight, or you publish your list of schools and you don’t know who is on the list, then that starts to show. I think he’s made some mistakes, but I think we’ve also been strong. We’ve been pretty relentless in exposing the contradictions and the flaws, and there’s no local newspaper around the country that I’ve talked to which doesn’t immediately say that they’ve been writing a lot about building schools for the future cuts if they’re in that area.

A year ago, two years ago, Michael Gove wanted to talk about the Swedish model. Now he’s desperate not to talk about Sweden at any opportunity. He knows that it’s a big negative for him, and he doesn’t want to go anywhere near it. And that is a product of the search and understanding and good politics and winning the arguments.

The same thing is true on the economy – if we accept the intellectual tenor, and direction of the consensus and try and but at the margin we’ll be fairer, we’re not going to win the argument. Actually I think, as I said in the speech last Friday, in key moments in British economic history the consensus has been wrong. I think this is one of them, and I think Labour is in a much stronger position arguing for a clearer alternative. You’ve got to win the intellectual argument, as well as winning the campaign argument on the ground. If you don’t do that then you’re never in a strong enough position to really make your position deliver. So it’s not just the skirmishes. It’s not the detail only. It’s whether you can show that as a different philosophy, a flawed set of values, a mistaken direction, a misreading of history, a misreading of the international evidence.

Going back to your speech on Friday, you used an interesting phrase, which a lot of people have picked up on – “growth deniers”. I’m not going to ask you the question that everyone else rushes to ask you – what would you cut…?
Because you know as I said on Friday that was not where we should be…

We’re comfortable talking about growth now though, and we were talking about growth during the general election. But the media became obsessed with cuts. Do you think we should have been more positive? Do you think we were almost a little hesitant about saying there is a way out of this that is positive?
I think we got caught between on the one hand wanting to make the argument for growth, and secondly having a deficit reduction plan which caused us difficulties in terms of explaining how it was going to be delivered. And that wasn’t a problem for us two years ago when we were in the depth of recession, but as the recovery started to emerge and the deficit reduction plan came a bit nearer I think that caused us a difficulty. Personally I’d have rather we had done a spending review, rather than postpone it, but I’d rather have done it on the basis of a set of tax increases, but also a spending restraint which we could have delivered. My fear, as always, is that spending restraint was fairly difficult to deliver in its entirety, and it was very hard to set out. That was where we were a bit caught. I do think it wasn’t clear enough, the economic message, I would much rather have ruled out a VAT rise. I think we could have gone much further on tax. I was trying in my department, I went further than anybody, in setting out the details of spending restraint. The details of spending restraint in my department were consistent with education rising at 0.7% in real terms. That was the agreement I had with Alistair Darling. If you had cuts which were big in real terms it wasn’t clear how that was going to add up.

Was it interesting as a minister to be on the other side of Treasury discussions, making the case for spending rather than the case against spending?
I knew to be cautious when they started saying there’s a bit of a quirk in the GDP deflator, because there’s a few old games which can be played. Fundamentally, on education and the wider children’s agenda – in terms of spending – I think we were in a pretty good place. I never had a single cross word with Alistair Darling or the Chief Secretary. You know I had to persuade people that we needed to fund, for example, the school leavers guarantee last year – but fundamentally we had a position where we had a much tighter real terms rise for education than we’d had in the three previous spending reviews, much tighter. But I showed how you can make that add up by a combination of restraint and efficient savings within the schools world and outside the schools world. And that, I thought, was a pretty coherent position – tighter but protecting the front line. And that’s something that Alistair and I worked out together. So it wasn’t like there was an antagonism. But one thing was very frustrating the day after the Pre Budget Report – when Nick Robinson arrived to say that Alistair Darling and I had huge rows about spending and I had won and wasn’t that terrible – which then went into a whole week of reports on how I wanted to spend more, and the class war and all of that spin. But the truth was that the previous Sunday, Alistair and I sat down. The second time I’d talked to him about the Pre Budget Report. He said this is what I want to do, and I said that’s great, that’s fine. We were in total agreement. I’m afraid there may have been some Treasury officials who weren’t very happy with what Alistair and I had agreed, but Alistair and I agreed, and it was a good political outcome. Our problem was that we didn’t reflect that same approach in others areas of public spending. And therefore we were vulnerable and that was a difficulty for us.

Do you think we need to go further now than Alistair Darling was willing to go before the election, in terms of our forward offer on the economy?
Sure. But that’s just sort of where we are. In a sense we’re in a different phase now. Look at unemployment and growth in the second quarter – our policies are working. It is clear that they are working in Britain in a way which is in contrast to what’s happening in the rest of the world – in America and Europe. And it’s clear that the coalition has suddenly decided to do a complete U-turn and go in the wrong direction. So we have to be clear about why we’re taking a different view now anyway. I’ve said that you need a credible deficit reduction plan, but it’s got to be credible. That means it needs to be deliverable, and I think we need to set out a timetable which is longer than the coalition is planning. Longer than we were planning. I think that’s coherent.

One of the things that is often said to me by other party members is, “I really like Ed Balls, I’ve been really impressed with his campaign, it has dispelled a lot of the myths about him, I think he has been fantastic on education, I think he was a good minister – but I’m not going to vote for him.” Why do you think that is, and what would you say to those people?

I think that lots of people have spent the last two months asking themselves that same question – and I think maybe the answer is that they should vote for me as their first preference. I think there has been some changing of minds going on. I think there was partly, in May, the perception that I might have been too close to Gordon Brown and the perception that perhaps we need someone more Nick Clegg and David Cameron. I think that feels increasingly out of date. The question now is: who do people think, in the last month, has been most effective against David Cameron and Nick Clegg? And I think our campaign shows that we’ve been.

There are two conclusions you can draw from the last election. You can say “Gordon Brown had too hard a time from the media, we need to have someone who gets less hard a time from the media.” Tony Blair had less hard a time from the media, although that increasingly shifted. But I don’t think, really, you can choose your Labour Party leader on the basis of whether or not they’re going to get a hard time or a more comfortable time from the right wing press. Most Labour Party members would think “we’re not going to be dictated to in that way”. Secondly, it may be that what happened in the last election was that until the final few days, Gordon Brown spent too much time worrying about trying to be nice to the right wing media and not being clear enough about what he was actually for, and saying “OK, look, I am distinctive, and business may not have been with me on this issue or the Daily Mail on that issue, but that’s fine, this is my point of view.” I think that’s the wrong conclusion to draw. I’ve not done that. If we were pandering to the press, I wouldn’t have made that speech on Friday. But the main reason the Labour Party liked my speech is because people said “at last, somebody is setting out the alternative”. And leadership is about winning the argument, and changing people’s minds. It’s not about repeating back to people what they already think, or think they want to hear. The fact is that I’m supported by Ken Livingstone, Jim Knight and John Spellar. Anybody who can do that can unite the Labour Party.

You mention Ken there. A lot of people were surprised at how yourself and Ken have worked together, especially over the past couple of weeks, despite being seen as from different wings and different pasts in the party. What is it that you seen in Ken, and what do you think it is that he sees in you?
Ken Livingstone and Gordon Brown didn’t get on. Especially in the early years. But actually I found myself, in the jobs that I did, dealing with Ken. He has strong views like I do. But he was also a pragmatist and a doer and a deliverer. He cared about building houses and delivering jobs. He would agree that we should regulate the financial services harder, but he was also happy to go India and China and sell London as a place to come and invest and do business. It’s all very well making speeches and wearing your values on your sleeve, but the question is: can you actually do the job? And Ken Livingstone can do the job – in marked contrast to Boris Johnson, if you ask me.

When the leadership election was first called, Ken Livingstone said to me “I don’t know where you stand on every policy issue and I don’t know that I’ll agree with you on everything, but I do know that you don’t get dictated to by the civil service, that you can make decisions, you deliver, that you’ve got the steel and subtlety to actually do government” more than, he said, other people he’d worked with. And that’s why he thought I was the right person to support. Since then he’s come out and said that on jobs and on the economy and now on housing, I’m taking the right position. But I think from him it was at least as much about judgement and ability to do the job. And that from my point of view is a pretty good endorsement really.

Have you found it easier to make tough decisions and set out your policies in more depth because so much of the media spotlight has been on the two Milibands?
Well I’ve been trying to get the media spotlight to look at the substance of what we’ve been talking about. I think most people would think we’ve had a lot of the TV media spotlight, because we’ve managed to engage people with big ideas and the debates of the day, rather than some of the more inside-of-Westminster political speak, which I think probably goes over the heads of most people as pretty hard to understand.

One potential problem is the size of your majority. Isn’t it a problem to have a leader where we could win government but lose his seat?
First of all I would say, I fought that seat and went to forty plus, forty-five plus marginal seats. I did as many visits as anybody, possibly with the exception of the leader, in the election campaign, right around the country. Secondly when the Mrs Duffy moment happened, and I heard the reports in the newspapers, I was down in Dorset. I thought she must have said the most outrageous things, and when I heard the tape, I realise that I’d spoken to her, or someone like her, two or three thousand times. Because if you’re a campaigning MP, you knew those concerns – they were the concerns of Labour voters, and I had spent two years answering those concerns on the doorstep in my constituency. Thirdly, part of the reason why none of the leadership candidates in the election – Nick Clegg, David Cameron, Gordon Brown – really succeeded in the leadership debates, was precisely because they didn’t really quite talk the language of those voters. I don’t think any of them were really in touch with the reality of where things were in a constituency like mine. The Tories threw as much Lord Ashcroft money as they could at me. I was supposed to be their Portillo moment. David Cameron came at least twice, and I won and they lost. So if you want somebody who’s in touch, who can campaign, who can take everything the Tories can throw at them and beat them, then I’m your person. And nobody else can make that claim among the leadership candidates, and surely that’s the most important thing. If I don’t win my seat, we won’t get a majority – and I’m only in this because I want Labour to get back in to government. If that’s not what you’re about, don’t vote for me.

Final question – you have thirty seven MP supporters, that’s a substantial disadvantage in that section to overhaul. What does the route to victory for Ed Balls look like? Is there a strategy?
Our strategy has been to not get involved in the sort of “inside the beltway” conversation, but to be out there saying: we’ve had a brilliant response on the emails to the economy speech, and from MPs, because they’re all saying “we’ve been waiting for somebody to who actually can set out the case which is coherent”. On housing, on building schools for the future – that’s what our campaign has been about. I think I’m right in saying that in the deputy leadership campaign, Hilary Benn had the most CLP nominations, Alan Johnson had the most MP nominations, Jon Cruddas the most union nominations and Peter Hain the most fundraising. Harriet Harman failed all of those tests and she won the election. So therefore anybody who tells you it’s already decided hasn’t necessarily got history on their side. No leadership candidate has a majority of the MPs, so it will all depend on what happens with transfers, and how that all works. I need first preferences, but obviously transfers will be important as well. And we don’t know how that’s going to develop and it’s going to be unpredictable. I’m hoping we’re picking up more support on first and second preferences at the moment because of the campaigning that we’re doing, and the work we’re doing. It is absolutely clear I wouldn’t be David Cameron’s first choice for a drink after work…

I’d pay good money to see that…
But maybe that’s a good thing in a Labour Party leader, do you know what I mean? Nobody thinks we’re going to have a chat over the dispatch box after a debate. I don’t know what it is, but I’m the one he goes on about, and not in a particularly positive way. Maybe people in the Labour Party will start thinking about that. The conclusion George Osborne and David Cameron drew from the Bush/Gore election – as seen by George Osborne almost a decade ago – was that the way to win, as a right of centre party, is to try to avoid policy debate, and to go for personality. Which is what they did to Gordon, and that’s something Gordon found very difficult to deal with. I remember a columnist chatting to a friend of mine five years ago, saying that they’d had lunch with Ken Clarke the day before, and this was back in 2005, and Ken Clarke had said to the columnist that he was speaking to David Cameron and George Osborne the day before, and said “The one you’ve got to fear is Ed Balls.” And I think they made a decision to try and make life difficult to me. But it doesn’t make any difference to me; it makes me want to win and to do the right thing even more.