Balls and more balls.

Slightly odd this, from Michael Crick.  In Cameron’s speech yesterday he referred to Ed Balls’s comment to Toby Young on Newsnight that “The danger is that there will be winners” and then riffed on that subject:

Winners? We can't have that. The danger that your child might go to school and turn out to be a winner. Anti-aspiration. Anti-success. Anti-parents who just want the best for their children.

What an unbelievable attitude from this Labour generation.

Michael Crick thinks that this is a distortion of what Balls said, which was different. Well, here’s what Balls said, in full:

The danger is that there will be winners, but it is dishonest to suggest that there will not be losers as well.

Which is, as John Rentoul says, precisely what Cameron said that he said.  Labour seem to believe, in these post-Blair days, that no-one should be allowed to do well, on the grounds that not everyone will.  Or, as John Prescott said “If you set up a school and it becomes a good school, the great danger is that’s the place they want to go to.” Ed Balls has become the thinking man’s John Prescott.