Since children are our future we must do something about this idiot. He is not just a loony politician, he is positively dangerous
Ed Balls: 'sniffs out pathetic party-political squabbles at every turn, speaks an obscure and baffling dialect of officialese'
Jerky-voiced Edward Balls, the genius who with Gordon Brown devised the 1997 bank regulation changes which just nearly wrecked our economy, is now in charge of our state schools. Terrifying.
Mr Balls, who calls himself 'Children's Secretary' instead of Education Secretary, came to the Commons to announce that national tests for 14-year-olds are being scrapped.
Why? Because Britain's bureaucratic elite is too incompetent to run a system which a couple of months ago blew up like an Austin Allegro on the fast lane of the M4.
Not that Mr Balls put it quite like that. This appalling creature, who sniffs out pathetic party-political squabbles at every turn, speaks an obscure and baffling dialect of officialese. He churns it out, furthermore, at great length, his parliamentary answers rolling forth like the Silk Road.
Speaker Martin - who seems to be coasting towards retirement - at one point stirred himself to implore Balls to keep his answers shorter. The plea was ignored.
Instead of admitting that this summer's Sats were a balls-up, the Secretary of State glottal-foghorned away about how 'it was important that we evaluated the case for change before making decisions'. First he said that 'the principle of national testing is sound'. Then he said that these principles 'do not justify the Key Stage 3 testing arrangements in their current form'.
See what I mean? Listening to Mr Balls is agony. You know that the words have been spoken. You sense that they hang together in a vaguely grammatical way. And you realise that, if pored over by scholars of Whitehall glurption, learned minds able to weave their way through all the dead metaphors and redundant prepositions and rusting jargon so beloved of Mr Balls, it would be possible to deduce some meaning.
But you know you haven't the energy to face it.
Approaching a Balls speech is like facing a long chunk of the Aeneid in Latin and having to produce an English translation. Not that it is remotely fair to compare the great Virgil to this interfering, U-turning, goldfish-gasping didact.
Mr Balls began his Statement by boasting that his 'far-reaching reforms' would 'strengthen school accountability'. His speeches tend to be full of such Soviet propaganda. Every reform has to be 'far reaching'. It's the same speech-by-numbers approach that gives us 'hard-working families' and 'real issues affecting real people'.
Mr Balls pulled himself up an inch or two and said that he had sacked the company which ran the Sats. He did not disclose that the berks who appointed this very company were Ken Boston, who runs the exams quango - and Balls himself! Another triumph for this agent of incompetence.
The Tories' Michael Gove opened his remarks by welcoming the decision to dump the tests. It was in his very first sentence. Oddly, Mr Balls later complained that he was unsure if Mr Gove approved of the changes or not.
Gove made the mistake of trying to be courteous to the gassy Minister. Mr Balls spent almost all his next riposte slagging off Mr Gove for being, basically, a member of the Conservative Party. As he did so he kept turning to Mr Speaker, stuttering and opening his bulgy eyes ever wider.
But rest easy, parents of Britain. Mr Balls is creating 'a new Expert Group' of Establishment types who will 'advise us on the development' of a replacement system of assessing schools. 'We will work closely with our social partners', said Mr Balls. Social partners? One of Mr Balls's press officers said that it meant 'the unions'.
So why not say 'unions', Minister? Why does he have to find new ruddy jargon for everything?
The reason is that the jargon, Key Stage this, 'value decisions' that, 'challenges in educational achievement' and 'personalised teaching' etc, is designed to do what wretched educationalists have been doing for the past 30 years: Dreaming up waffle to disguise the wreckage of our schools and the terrible betrayal of our pupils.
