Ed Balls, class traitor

Ed Balls is a class traitor. He's accepting that 'we are going to have keep all these cuts'. He's using the government's language of 'pay restraint' when discussing the effective public sector pay cuts in addition to job losses that the Tories are imposing. He's attempting to play workers against each other by creating a false dichotomy between 'higher pay and bringing unemployment down'. In the conflict between the government and the working class, he's positioned the Labour Party firmly in the enemy camp.

Some people don't get upset with Labour anymore because they've come to expect this. I think the reason this sort of betrayal still angers me - the reason it still feels like betrayal at all - is that the Labour Party was founded to be the political arm of the working class, to fight capital and get a fair deal for the great majority, whereas both the Liberals and the Tories have always been bourgeois parties. In capturing Labour, the odious neoliberal flunkeys of the Balls-Miliband variety have turned a weapon of the working class against it.

There are many among the Labour rank and file who are actively fighting cuts and working within the movement against austerity. Balls is betraying them, too. The old Blairite instincts of the party oligarchy are alive and well. We can't count on the Labour Party leadership - and if not now, will they ever be on the right side? There is no parliamentary opposition, and that means there isn't actually any politics left within parliament. But there have been, and will be, marches, strikes and occupations. We will fight, and we will win.

As for Balls, don't say that he's hypocritical - say rather that he's apolitical.