Who Is Ed Balls The New Labour Party Shadow Chancellor?

What does the public know about the new Labour shadow chancellor Ed Balls who has taken over from Alan Johnson who rather sadly left the Labour front bench over what he said were 'personal issues'.

However we do know that Ed Balls was not the initial choice of Ed Miliband the Labour leader.

Mr Balls has advised that he was some what surprised that the new Labour leader Ed Miliband had made him home affairs spokesman instead of shadow chancellor in September 2010.

The decision by Miliband was seen as his clear statement that he was the boss and he was not, at all, overawed by Balls to whom he was junior when they were both employed at the Treasury working for Gordon Brown.

It is also believed that there were many deep policy disagreements over financial policy. Also Ed Balls is much more relucant to criticise Gordon Brown's terrible record of total financial mismanagement than Ed Miliband. This is not at all surprising as he was Gordon Brown's closest political ally.

Ed Balls was during the years 1994 to 1997 an economic adviser to the then Labour party shadow chancellor Gordon Brown.

When the Labour party won the 1997 election with a huge landslide, Gordon Brown was duly appointed Chancellor, and Mr Balls continued to be employed as an economic adviser to him. He went on to serve as chief economic adviser to the Treasury from 1999 to 2004, and in this position he was once called the 'most powerful unelected person in Britain'.

In July 2004, Mr Balls was chosen to stand as the Labour and Co-operative candidate for the seat of Normanton in West Yorkshire a Labour stronghold whose MP, Bill O'Brien , was coming up for retirement.

Mr Balls is married to Yvette Cooper, and they were actually the first husband and wife team to serve at the same time in the Labour government.

When chosen as a candidate he stepped down from being the chief economic adviser to HM Treasury and was given a position at the Smith Institute a political think tank.

It has been reported that he was paid £100,000 for less than six month's work. HM Treasury and the Cabinet Office confirmed that "the normal and proper procedures were followed.". What ever exactly they could be?

Mr Balls became an Economic Secretary to the Treasury, a junior ministerial position in the Treasury in the Labour government reshuffle in May 2006.

When Blair resigned as PM Gordon Brown became an unelected Prime Minister on 27 June 2007 and Mr Balls was advanced to the position of Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families.

Mr Balls has played a leading role in the Fabian Society, the political society and think tank founded in 1884 which helped to start the Labour Party way back in 1900. He wrote a Fabian pamphlet in 1992 advocating Bank of England independence, a policy that was swiftly enacted when Gordon Brown became Chancellor in 1997.

It could well be that the lack of proper banking supervision which went a long way to creating the UK banking crisis is properly attributed to Ed Balls and not to Gordon Brown.

Ed was elected the Vice-Chairman of the Fabian Society in 2006 and Chairman of the the Fabian Society in the year 2007.

At one point, Miss Cooper and Mr Balls, the then Children's Secretary and as mentioned above a very close,if not the closest ally of Gordon Brown, had their parliamentary expenses docked, after they had both submitted duplicate monthly claims for mortgage interest of just under £1,300.

If some body makes such a balls of their own expense claim what hope do they ever run the country correctly?

Well we must remember that for many years Balls was none other than the chief economic advser at the Treasury and as we can all see from the mess left by the worst chancellor of the exchequer in living memory Gordon Brown.


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