Stall full of shoddy goods

But, unfortunately for Mr Balls, his choice of carrot only revealed the wide gap between his version of reality and the world in which the rest of us live.

The shadow education secretary stressed his plan would ensure everyone of working age had the right to a job and the responsibility to take it.

And he called for a new guarantee to ensure that anyone unemployed for more than 18 months would be given a job or work placement.

So far, you might think, so good. Not a bad aspiration for a Labour leadership candidate. And you would be right. But, in true new Labour style, Mr Balls fell at the fence which always gets in the way. The one with the question "how do you do it?" written across it.

Mr Balls said: "Labour must challenge the misguided view that cutting spending to reduce the deficit is the right priority this year or that we can somehow cut our way to recovery."

Sounds good at first, but that silly phrase "this year" once again intervened. It's that weakness again, the reluctance to abandon cuts cuts and more cuts, modified by some specious time interval within which the cuts are just a little bit previous.

How long does Mr Balls think it takes to revive an economy that's been profiteered and speculated into recession? One month, two months, six months, a year?

Where is the magic point at which his cuts come into effect and how are these miraculously created jobs to survive when they do? A call for 100,000 new affordable homes to be built is laudable, but to solve the huge gap in the provision of social housing, such an initiative would have to continue at that level for at least a decade and possibly twice as long.

Housing falls into decay and needs maintenance, while demand continues to grow, so when do these looming cuts, that he won't abandon, take effect? And how, when they do, will the housing initiative continue?

It certainly won't be helped by the private housing construction sector. Those unhelpful chaps have proved time and again that they don't build unless the cash is available for them to get a nice fat profit.

And with the mortgage market squeezed nigh on to death, with credit virtually unavailable, with public-sector cuts decimating available jobs and eliminating any growth in new ones, the cash won't be there unless the public sector finds it, in the shape of government and local authorities.

But local authorities are being strangled by spending cuts now, and even under Mr Balls's preferred regime they would still be strangled - a little later rather than sooner, but strangled all the same.

And with a long-term commitment such as housing, "later" needs to be far, far later than Mr Balls and his ilk will tolerate. Even should the finance be found under any conceivable futuristic Ballsite regime, Mr Balls and his mentor Tony Blair share a real aversion to allowing local authorities to be the central unit in the supply of social housing, preferring the grey area of housing association, arm's-length provision.

And that, we are afraid, has only managed in the immediate past to supply too little and too expensively - at least for the tenants forced into paying so-called market rents which are beyond them, the level of housing market rents being what forced most prospective tenants into the social housing area anyway.

No, in setting out his stall, Mr Balls, unfortunately for himself and for the labour movement, has only revealed the short-termism and lack of understanding of the nature of free-market capitalism which has dogged new Labour and continues to dog its heirs apparent in this poverty-stricken leadership race.