At a Treasury briefing in 1997, Ed Balls, then Gordon Brown’s economic guru, sidled up to me. He wanted to tell me why his boss was so determined to keep government borrowing under control.
Every pound spent servicing the national debt, he rightly explained, was money wasted – money that could instead be spent on public services.
Only a decade later, Balls’s rare kernel of economic wisdom had been forgotten. Brown was forced to borrow heavily to shore up Britain’s collapsing banking system – and ever since then, the principle Balls outlined to me that day has been callously abandoned by his
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