Politics & Power Quote by Ed Balls

Ed Balls delivers a neat piece of political jujitsu here: he borrows the language of catastrophe, then flips it into a dare. "Edge of the abyss" is deliberately apocalyptic, the kind of phrase that primes audiences for austerity, crackdowns, and performative hardness. But the punchline is the pivot: "a bold step forward" is a wry inversion of the cliché (you expect a step back). It signals a refusal to treat crisis as a mandate for punishment, and it frames action - spending, reform, intervention - as courage rather than recklessness.

The second line names the real target: the theatrical economy of credibility. In modern British politics, especially in the post-financial-crisis era Balls is speaking from, "tough" gets marketed as synonymous with "serious": deficit-cutting as moral rectitude, harshness as competence, discipline as adulthood. Balls exposes that as a worldview, not a law of nature. He's arguing that credibility is often a costume stitched from punitive instincts and media optics: who can sound least sentimental, most unbending, most willing to make someone else pay.

The subtext is internal as much as external. It's a message to his own side not to cede the emotional register of strength to opponents who equate care with weakness. The line tries to reclaim boldness for a politics of agency and investment, while admitting, with a politician's candor, that perception management is half the battle.