Friday, July 18, 2008
More on Balls
Responding to the exam marking chaos, Ed Balls, the education secretary, said on the BBC 6 o'clock news, 'I am angry, I am upset.' One wonders which part of 'it's not about you' he doesn't understand. He added he was going to demand an apology from the American company that marked the scripts. An hour later, on Channel 4 News, he was a different man. It wasn't really a crisis, these were just a few errors that were bound to happen... etc. He was no longer angry, he was no longer upset. Clearly he had taken a call - one wonders from whom. Balls is a remarkable phenomenon, a senior politician with no talent whatsoever for politics. The Economist this week said Brown had 'a tin ear for public discourse'. Balls is stone deaf. The obvious explanation for this is the way the Brownies spent the Blair years cloistered with their bitterness and longing. Isolated and convinced they were right, they never actually did any politics and, now in the blinding light of day, their shortcomings are exposed. But Balls is such an extreme case that one wonders if some other force is at work. My own impression is that he doesn't seem to care about the real world effects of what he does, only on its Westminster impact. He can never be angry or upset about real people. One wonders about his future career....
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
"A senior politician with no talent whatsoever for politics". Bingo. And yet so nakedly holds the belief that he should be the next PM. If nothing else, the Brownites are an entertainingly extreme case study in dissonance theory: it would be a beautiful irony if Balls ended up as an exam question himself.
ReplyDeletei don't know anything about politics but i get the impression politicians are like academics, they only really talk to each other, or, exceptionally, to potential voters or people they can make under-the-counter deals with. They don't actually have any contact with human beings outside of the political arena. It's not surprising that PR and what not matter more to them than the actual real people Out There, who they never meet anyway.
ReplyDeleteIf you think Westminsterites are below par, head north and varder our lot, I had the misfortune last night not to which off a "debate" on the forthcoming murder capital of Europe's by-election. In the cast were Rab, Mary doll, Ella and Jamsie Cotter. aka members of the Scottish parliament, or Kirsty Warks gravy traina s it is sometimes referred to.
ReplyDeletewhy are our students being marked by Americans in the first place? Would it be spelling? Economics? History? Geography? (okay that last one was going too far, I know).
ReplyDeleteElberry, normally so incisive on most matters, is wrong here. Politicians do meet real people - often many more than you or I. Ever been to an MPs surgery? Usually it's asylum seekers and nutters that they meet - no wonder they prefer the Westminster cocoon. Truth is we're a laid back, apathetic bunch who'd rather watch sky sports than campaign for anything. So we end up with idiots like Balls and Government'slike Blair and Brown's. They were always a bunch of shysters but we took the soundbites and had a generation educated in the 60's and 70's that beleived itself to be leftish so we gave them a good ride. I was amused to see a recent question time with schoolkids who were rampant Daily Mailers on issues like knife crime. Labour and the wimpy Lib Dems had no answer. Iain Duncan Smith was the most popular man on the panel. They realise the baby boomers have cocked things up big time - they're at the sharp end and they're angry. I'm getting down there with the kids.
ReplyDeleteScottish parliament monkeys trump Westminster monkeys every time, as Malty so rightly points out. A year or so ago I went down there to gob on the parliament building and spotted a civil servant standing in the middle of the street booming into his cellphone: 'I talked to THE MINISTER... THE MINISTER wants this... THE MINISTER wants that...' Oh, I thought, he must have been down to London, met someone real. Then I realised he was talking about one of the toon cooncil types sitting inside the avant garde shopping centre/swimming pool design that passes for cutting edge architecture in Kirsty Wark's tiny, intellectually impoverished world. Then I realised he felt special and important because he was an associate of the toon cooncil type, a dog on the string of a BIG MAN. And I felt it was the saddest, most dismal display of human vanity I had ever seen.
ReplyDeleteThe man pops E day and night. Just look at his eyes ffs.
ReplyDeleteI watched an interview on Newsnight Scotland with the SSP canididate, Francis Curran. I ran out of the room screaming.
ReplyDelete