Data released today by the Office for National Statistics showed UK retail sales slumped during May. Including fuel, sales volumes fell by 1.4% last month, while excluding automotive fuel volumes decreased by 1.6%. George Osborne believes that lower tax economies are higher growth economies, he told us so many times in opposition. Just because Ed Balls advocates it today doesn’t automatically make it wrong to cut VAT. Balls is calling for a temporary suspension of the VAT hike to boost consumer spending and growth. Why not?

Ed Balls told Monday’s meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party that there was a plot against their leader. A plot coordinated by the Tories. But this just doesn’t make any sense.  How did the Tories get hold of Balls’s papers when his desk would have been cleared at the Department of Education before the transition of power? How did the Tories get hold of the draft of David Miliband’s un-delivered victory speech? No doubt they relished Ed Miliband’s discomfort, but they can’t have been pulling the strings. 

Rumour has it in Labour circles that Balls is making noises about bringing Damian McBride back into the fold. McPoison was spotted last night on the Commons Terrace and is creeping back on to the political scene, lobbying for international aid at a meeting with DfID shadow Harriet Harman last week. Damian’s girlfriend Balshan is already working for Team Balls. That doesn’t sit very well with one high-level shadow cabinet member.

The former Brown bunker-boy, turned Blairite-convert, Douglas Alexander felt the brutal sharp end of McBride’s briefings after the cancellation of Brown’s election in 2007. The blame for Brown’s dithering was thrown at his feet by Damian and Balls. He was still a relatively close insider during the Blair-plot days though, with access to the plans that ended up in the Daily Telegraph’s hands. Significant, however, was his Damascene conversion and subsequent appointment as David Miliband’s campaign manager. He would have seen every single draft of that victory speech.

Dougie has the motive and ability, does he have an alibi? The leaks were a non-fatal shot across the bow of Balls, reminding everyone of how ghastly and vicious Labour once was, as well as providing an incentive for Ed to up his game. Is it any surprise that suspicious fingers are being pointed at Wee Dougie…

UPDATE: Damian has been in touch, via text message, to dispute him being on the terrace last night. Must have been a look-a-like.

UPDATE II: Damian texts again to say he hasn’t seen Harriet for years. She was at the conference part-organised by Cafod, his new employer, but he missed her. Presumably when he fled Guido…

UPDATE III: 20 June 2011: Source now says, having seen a photo of Derek Draper, that it was Dolly not Damian. Guido apologises for the confusion.

The whole Ed Balls alternative economic strategy was first predicated on a double-dip recession, we hear no more of that nowadays, then it shifted from warning of a double-dip to lamenting slow GDP growth – even though UK GDP growth is above the EU average. But most incessantly Ed Balls wants George Osborne to stop reductions in the bloated public sector headcount “to hold down unemployment”. Coincidentally Labour’s paymasters are public sector unions…

In reality small firms are hiring workers, driving job creation, and according to the authoritative Manpower survey [PDF] hiring intentions are up 8% in the coming quarter and overall nationally recruitment is 3% above trend, a level not seen since the height of the financial crisis 3 years ago. Balls’ ideological adherence to Plan B is now rendered totally unnecessary…

At the urging of Ed Balls, David Bell, the Permanent Secretary in the Department for Education has ordered a leak inquiry which has sent his department into semi-paralysis. First thing to realise is that the desks and personal effects of ministers are cleared before a new administration comes in. So the source can not be political if we accept at face value Balls is telling the truth that the last he saw of the documents was in his old office. We know better than to accept anything Balls says at face value.

Could it be a civil servant? Why would Ed Balls, a secretive plotter by nature, leave such incendiary evidence lying around for civil servants to pinch. It shows that a PM had plotted against the former PM. Guido’s instinct is that this comes from within the Labour Party…

UPDATE: A source close to Gove tells Guido: “Like with Sharon Shoesmith, Ed Balls is pathetically trying to blame officials. He should ask his best friend Damian McBride how these things get leaked.” Ouch…

The Telegraph has published a cache of documents illuminating the internecine plotting of the Blair-Brown era. They literally have Ed Balls’ fingerprints all over them, hard evidence of what all of Westminster believes, that he was at the heart of the malign “forces of hell” which blighted New Labour. The Wednesday meetings of the Brownites were chaired by Balls in Downing Street to plot the downfall of both their internal and external enemies and ultimately Tony Blair. Balls has always denied the allegations, explicitly here to Andrew Neil who held his feet to the fire for five minutes during which Balls lies and lies:

Some will say this is a matter of only historical interest, they are wrong, the relevance to today is what it reveals about the character of Ed Balls, who still harbours the ambition to lead the Labour Party.

It is with some satisfaction that Guido notes references to the Smith Institute and its then boss Wilf Stevenson’s role in the plotting at the Wednesday meetings. All of which was denied at the time and resulted in Guido getting his own taste of the forces of hell unleashed from 11 Downing Street. Unfortunately for them Guido fought back and ultimately the Smith Institute was struck off by the Charity Commission and Damian McBride was fired. Browse the documents to see on paper Balls and the Brownites in all their cynical, malign, politically cancerous glory.

Red Ed saw another bandwagon he could jump on at his press conference on Monday. He lashed out at “financiers who creamed off millions”, blaming them for the near collapse of the UK’s largest care-home provider Southern Cross, which is laying of thee thousand staff as it cannot afford its £250 million rent bill. American investors Blackstone made a £134.5m profit from their sale of the company in 2007. As they held their shares for two years after floating the business, they only had to pay Capital Gains Tax on 25% of this profit, which worked out at £33.6m. If they had paid CGT at the usual 40% rate on 100% of the gain, they would have had a tax bill of £53.8m – £40.4m higher than they paid. But who was it that enabled them to “cream off millions”?

In April 1998, the government introduced taper relief for business assets, whereby the CGT rate was charged on only a proportion of the gain made from the disposal of an asset. In 2002, the Treasury increased this taper. Rather than a taper of 50% for a business asset held for two complete years, it was reduced to 25%. And who was running the show while these changes were thought up and implemented? 

Please step forward Treasury Special Advisers Edward Miliband (1997 -2002) and Edward Balls (1997 – 2004).

The IMF verdict is in and they suggest now is not the time to adjust policy as “strong fiscal consolidation remains essential”. No wonder the Chancellor went out of his way to stress that they were “the most independent of independent organisations” on his media rounds this morning…

Though their growth forecast for the UK has been revised down to 1.5% for 2011, the headline of “now is not the time to change course” will infuriate a certain blinker…

Bad news for the B-Team.

Given how noisy we know Balls can be when he wants to, he’s certainly got Gordon’s Macavity act down to a tee today. Which is hardly surprising given the savaging he just got in the High Court.

Balls failed to give controversial child services boss, Sharon Shoesmith, who does have a lot to answer for over the Baby Peter case, any chance to defend herself after he commissioned an Ofsted report that slammed her. He fired her live on TV instead and “she was denied the elementary fairness which the law requires.”

Balls will be hoping he has better luck at his next day in court on 1st June, where his former landlord is suing him.

Dastardly Balls and his Muttley-like SpAd Alex Bernardelli have been cock-a-hoop all day proclaiming that the experts at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development were backing his calls for a slower pace to the cuts:

“This is a very significant intervention. Even the OECD, which has traditionally supported government economic policy and George Osborne’s deficit reduction plan, is now saying the Chancellor should consider changing course.”

But as ever it, turned out to be balls.

The Secretary General of the OECD just went on Sky News to say he hasn’t changed his mind at all. Quite the opposite in fact, and he went on to accuse the Shadow Chancellor of misinterpreting what he’d said:

 “No way was there any signal of a change in course. We are continuing to be supportive. We can now say it with an even greater conviction because we just put out our economic outlook yesterday…”

Balls says we should always “listen to the economists”. Did he hear the CBI say that under Labour that “the economy would be weaker because of the impact of a loss of confidence in the markets”? Or how about when the IMF said Osborne’s plan “greatly reduces the risk of a costly loss of confidence in public finances and supports a balanced recovery…” Or what about when Mervyn King, he’s surely an expert, said that the government’s policy “has to be something where a really significant reduction in the deficit, the elimination of a large part of the structural deficit, takes place over the lifetime of a parliament.” Did he miss the British Chambers of Commerce Chief Economist David Kern say he “supports the need for credible deficit cutting measures over the next few years and supports the government’s emphasis on spending cuts rather than tax increases”?

Sounds like someone’s got a bad case of selective hearing.

Ed Balls’ right-hand man, Alex Belardinelli, is breaking parliamentary rules. Not by daily dripping poison into the ears of journalists by briefing against Ed Miliband (just as he did against Alan Johnson). His rule breaking results from him being a registered parliamentary passholder. If he is employed by the Labour Party and is failing to declare this interest in the Register Of Interests Of Members’ Secretaries And Research Assistants, he has broken the rules and failed to disclose a financial interest. Given Belardinelli emails party press releases from his parliamentary email account, signed off as ‘Political Adviser to the Shadow Chancellor’, this is not wise. In government it would be a resigning matter.

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If on the other hand he is employed by Parliament as a member of Mr Balls’ parliamentary staff he is breaking IPSA rules by conducting party political activities funded by the taxpayer. IPSA rules ban using parliamentary expenses for party political activities.

Belardinelli sends out party political materials from his parliamentary email address, effectively conducting taxpayer funded campaigning, which is against the rules. Admittedly these rules are widely broken, but they are the rules. If he is working for the Labour Party full time, then he should have declared as such in the register of interests:

‘In accordance with Resolutions made by the House of Commons on 17 December 1985 and 28 June 1993, holders of photo-identity passes as Members’ secretaries or research assistants are in essence required to register: Any occupation or employment for which they receive over £329 from the same source in the course of a calendar year, if that occupation or employment is in any way advantaged by the privileged access to Parliament afforded by their pass’

It is not as if he doesn’t have previous for doing this when he was a SpAd in government. So which is it? Is he breaking IPSA’s rules or Parliament’s rules?