Politics & Power Quote by Ed Balls

The muscle in Ed Balls's line is its laundry list: Conservatives and Labour, the Bank of England and the civil service, bosses (CBI) and unions (TUC), establishment papers and brainy magazines. He isn't reminiscing about 1925 so much as staging a cautionary tale about the danger of elite unanimity. By stacking institutions across class and ideology, he builds the impression of inevitability - a policy so widely endorsed it becomes less a choice than a weather system. That rhetorical move matters because it smuggles in the punchline without stating it: and they were still wrong.

The context is Churchill's return to the gold standard at the prewar parity, a move later blamed (Keynes most famously) for deflation, wage pressure, unemployment, and industrial conflict that helped set the stage for the General Strike. Balls leverages that episode as an argument about how economic "common sense" is manufactured. Consensus here isn't proof of correctness; it's evidence of a closed loop, where the same networks of expertise, prestige, and media reinforcement certify one another.

The subtext is aimed at contemporary Britain: central bank independence, fiscal rules, "credibility", and the politics of technocracy. If everyone important agrees, dissent gets framed as crankish or irresponsible - until reality vetoes the plan. Balls, a Labour politician with deep Treasury credentials, is also doing something shrewdly self-protective: he can critique establishment groupthink while signaling he understands it from the inside. The line flatters the listener into skepticism: don't confuse a crowded room with a sound argument.