Ed Balls speech to the Fabian Society

Ed Balls speech to the Fabian Society; ENGLAND: London: Fabian Society:INTMan introducing Ed Balls SOT / Ed Balls MP (Shadow Chancellor) speech SOT- Thank you Suresh and Andrew and to all of you for coming along today and giving up your Saturday to debate with us the economic alternatives. And let me start by saying after over 20 years of attending the Fabian annual January conference, what a great honour it is to be the first speaker. I first spoke at this conference in January 1993 when I was a junior leader writer at the Financial Times. It was a very different conference then, not the huge event it has become, with perhaps 100 or so people gathered at Ruskin College, Oxford, including among them the leader of the Labour Party, John Smith. That conference was held the January after Labour's election defeat in 1992, an election in which Labour failed to pass either of the two necessary political economy tests: neither having an alternative to the straitjacket of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, which could meet the aspirations of anxious voters on growth and jobs; nor a credible approach to tax and spending which could win public trust. Ten months on from that defeat, as we met in Oxford, sterling had recently crashed out of a troubled ERM, the idea of the single currency as the solution for Europe was gaining momentum in Brussels, and here in Britain Labour's 'modernisers' were trying to persuade John Smith that 'safety first' would not be enough. And my contribution at that Conference? To speak about my Fabian pamphlet, published a week or so before, which argued: that Labour could only win the argument for a radical alternative on growth and jobs if we had economic credibility; that neither the ERM nor the single currency could provide that credibility; and that the right approach for Labour and Britain was to make the Bank of England independent - a pretty controversial idea at the time. I remember showing the pamphlet draft to my FT colleagues Martin Wol...