Lord Lamont told ITV News…

“I think the PM is just human and Ed Balls is a pretty irritating person”

Ed Balls lines up with Obama saying…

“The IMF should not become the de factor central bank of the eurozone. That is the principled position Labour and the US government have taken and why we voted against increased funding last summer.”

RT @edballsmp Lab voted against whole Budget tonight.No chance to vote solely on 50p tax.Will ensure there is in Finance Bill & vote against—
Alex Belardinelli (@abelardinelli) March 26, 2012

Labour have spent all morning spinning the line that last night’s vote on the 45p tax rate was not a vote on it and that their abstention was not a massive howler. Well now Guido has seen a chain of emails between nervous political advisers looking to Balls’ bruiser Alex Belardinelli for direction on how to clean up his mess. Bear in mind that Belardinelli and Balls have spent the morning denying that this was a cock up or anything other than part of their grand master plan:

From: “BELARDINELLI, Alex”
Date: 27 March 2012 09:42:32 GMT+01:00
Subject: Re: Fwd: Nats in 50p

Truth is there was a screw up somewhere along the way last night and it wasn’t clear what SNP had called a vote on or how, so we abstained on their vote.

Line is: we voted against whole Budget package which obviously includes 50p (first vote at 10pm), and we will seek to amend and vote on the Finance Bill on 50p, plus other issues of concern like the changes to allowances for pensioners (granny tax). There’s not much more we can say beyond that.

Other advisers “hope it will be ignored” after “trying to find out what went wrong”. They even share Guido’s coverage of events. The whole email chain can be found here.

Who would have thought that someone trained  in the dark arts by firstly Tom Watson and then Balls would say one thing in public and something very different in private…

Division 506 last night covered  the 45p rate of incomes tax. A perfect time for Labour to cement their opposition to the cut after days of noise:

PROCEDURE (FUTURE TAXATION: RATES OF INCOME TAX)

Question put,

That, notwithstanding anything to the contrary in the practice of the House relating to the matters that may be included in Finance Bills, any Finance Bill of the present Session may contain the following provisions about income tax taking effect in a future year—

(a) provision that for the tax year 2013-14—

(i) the basic rate is 20%,

(ii) the higher rate is 40%, and

(iii) the additional rate is 45%, and

provision about other rates of income tax.

The House divided:

Ayes 319, Noes 22.

This is despite the promise made by Ed Balls last Thursday that: “There will be a vote next week, and we will vote against the 50p change.” Instead they were whipped into abstaining. Just two Labour MPs bothered to turn up to vote.

Balls claims there was no vote.

Hansard says otherwise…

Given that this was only put down as a 10 Minute Rule Bill in January, Tory MP Ben Gummer’s tax-transparency campaign looks set to be one of the more successful backbench tales of recent times. Given that Labour only managed to find a technicality on which to oppose it when it was debated in the House, can we now presume that Balls will be backing it? The Staggers is already starting to moan. Will Balls manage to find a line on why he doesn’t want taxpayers knowing how the government spends their hard earned cash?

Ed Balls was on the Marr show this morning and also has an article in the Sunday Times ahead of the budget, advocating tax cuts to boost growth. He repeats his long-standing call for a reversal of the consumer whacking VAT hike and comes over like a born-again Nigel Lawson in his article:

…cut the basic rate of income tax by 3p for a year. Or raise the income tax personal allowance to more than £10,000… It would be better to cut VAT now — it’s fairer and quicker and would help pensioners and others who don’t pay income tax. But any substantial tax cuts to help households and stimulate the economy would be better than doing nothing.

Tax cuts won’t scare international bond markets, even the austerity friendly IMF is advocating a VAT cut for Britain, government gilts are propped up by QE (for now) so the issue of bond market vigilantism doesn’t arise.

It was a mistake to hike VAT and it is a strategic error to burden industry with crushingly high green taxes and penal marginal income tax rates of over 50% discouraging entrepreneurs from coming to invest in Britain. If the government is going to miss the deficit target, and it is, miss it because the government slashed taxes to grow the economy. The international bond markets will forgive a finance minister with a growing economy who misses his deficit target, they won’t forgive a finance minister with a contracting economy in any circumstances. Chancellor Zero knows that with no growth there is no hope for the deficit.

Only children get half-term, but there is always a big song and dance about MPs using recess to spend time in their constituency. Picking one MP at random, Guido decided to see if that was really the case…

Just because Parliament is in recess does not mean the Shadow Chancellor is not needed. With Mervyn King offering his latest pearls of wisdom this morning, you would have expected Balls to be very vocal today. He’s certainly not tweeting. Guido rang Ed’s mobile to no avail, though it did have a UK ringtone. He tried his Westminster office too:

“I’m afraid he’s in his constituency today.” 

Which is odd given the comical message on his constituency office voicemail:

“I’m afraid today, the 15th February, there will be no one available to take your call.”

One Labour source put it bluntly when Guido asked if Balls was about: “everyone’s on holiday”. The other Ed is apparently “working from home” this morning. 

UPDATE: Despite his office being shut, Ed Balls just popped up on the television from Leeds. In other news Peter Hain is in South Africa.

The number of former and current Labour figures standing wasn’t the only reason Guido was a little surprised to receive a ranty email about Elected Police Commissioners from Ed Balls in the middle of the night. While the news was breaking that Moody’s would downgrade Britain if his Plan B was adopted, Ed decided to tread on his wife’s toes at 12:37am and send out polling data showing that Labour members don’t like the move. Curiouser and curiouser.

Yvette tried her hardest but failed, to halt Elected Police Commissioners as Shadow Home Secretary. Since they became a reality, the Party have been recruiting candidates:

“Ahead of the elections next November, Labour wants to hear from a diverse range of candidates, from all walks of life, who are interested in becoming a Police and Crime Commissioner in the area in which they live.”

Guido understands that Labour’s official position is to still oppose the Elected Commissioners, though they accept that there is nothing they can do until after the next election. The Shadow Home Secretary has been rather muted as a result, while a host of Party grandees line up to serve. Yet the Shadow Chancellor isn’t letting it go:

“You want money spent on front line policing to keep our communities safe, and at the very least to save money by holding elections alongside other elections. I completely agree. I’m writing to the Home Secretary Theresa May to ask her to listen to you and reconsider her plans. I’ll be back soon with an update.”

Guido signed up to this list to receive updates about the Ed Balls for Leader campaign, and he is now using that mailing list to stir things well beyond his brief. How odd…

Intriguing news tonight via Paul Waugh: Balls has brought in Gary Follis to be his new Chief of Staff. Before a brief stint in the real world, Follis was SpAd to Nick Brown (Gordon’s Chief Whip and Commander of the “Forces of Hell”). As talk of the Balls’ lasagne plots spread, Guido has to wonder how Miliband feels about “Nick Brown’s boot boy” returning to the fold. It could have been worse though, one exhasperated Labour staffer coughs “it’s the job he wanted to give to Damian. It’s still pretty much a declaration of war on Ed though…”

UPDATE:

While Guido was over at PoliticsHome, laughing at that development, he noticed that the latest chapter in the Aidan Burley Nazi-gate story didn’t take very long to fall apart. Burley was accused by a teenager on Twitter of sleeping during a Holocaust lecture. It turns out that the teacher who organised the trip, on which said teenager conveniently managed to recognise Burley, is a Labour councillor:

“After the lecture, Ms Reeves confronted Dr Smith and Burley and (wrongly) assumed the doctor was a Tory aide. Ms Reeves is then alleged to have told Smith and Burley that she knew Ed Miliband…”

Playing politics on a trip to Auschwitz. Stay classy.