Boo Hiss!

In recent days I've been searching for signs that the Labour party has come to its senses - that it has decided to stop treating people, including its natural supporters, like useful idiots.

But every time I hear a senior Labour figure speaking out and giving us the benefit of their wisdom - I suspect this might ultimately be a hopeless task.

Take last week - when Ed Balls the shadow chancellor visited the annual TUC congress - and told the unions that Labour was right to back public sector pay freezes. 

Ed Balls argued that the priority at the moment must be preserving jobs - not pay increases - and that any future Labour government would face desperate tough times - as well as a bleak economic inheritance from the present coalition government. 

In other words exactly the same circumstances the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition confronted after the last general election in 2010 - when a senior Labour minister (Liam Byrne) left a hand written message for his Tory/Lib Dem successor which said:

'There's no money left!' - which turned out to be true, if something of an understatement.

So it seems to me that Labour policy on public sector pay - would be little if any different to that of the present coalition government.

In which case what Ed Balls had to say to the brothers and sisters was all just smoke and mirrors - so much hot air.

Now Ed Balls was booed and jeered by the TUC - for speaking what he presumably believed to be the truth.

Just as the Home Secretary (Theresa May) was booed by the Police Federation a few months ago - when she delivered the same message to the police trade union.

But the irony for the TUC is that Ed Balls was Gordon Brown's right hand man - during the formative years of the last Labour government - a time when the 'Iron Chancellor' was proudly claiming that Labour had finally put an end to the bad old days of boom and bust economics.

How foolish that claim looks now and while Labour did some good things in office - the fact remains that they played fast and loose with the public finances - by running the economy on a ever increasing spiral of debt which eventually ran out of control.

The argument now is about how to rebuild and repair the damage done to the national economy - but the truth is that the Labour party's remedies are much the same as the coalition government in Westminster.

And anyone who tells you any different - including Ed Balls of course - is talking through a hole in their head.