“It’s likely Ed Balls will use this as further ammunition today to attack Michael Gove.” our protaganist said gleefully.

The Tories are still playing the blame the last guys game, how long before people realise it is just a conveninet narrative.

Anyone running a sweepstake on how long Gove will last? I give him two months tops.

You’re gonna have to attack Gove on more than inane trivialities if you want your scalp.

It’s difficult to scrap that which does not and could NEVER exist thanks to the fantasy economics of delusional mental lefties like Balls.

Probably best to ignore mad Tory nutjobs like Martin Coxall who will defend Gove’s brand of callous savagery. He is the rotund idiot who attacked John Prescott in East London during the election campaign, and ended up making a rather flabby fool of himself and getting dragged off to the cells by the police where his gargantuan carcass probably belongs.

He also appeared in a ridiculous fat people reality show a couple of years ago so his attention-seeking has a long history. He’s Rupert Pupkin on doughnuts basically.

@3

“inane triviality” = “safe space for children to play”.

And £235m is how much exactly of the deficit? It’s like stopping buying a Sunday paper to reduce your mortgage.

@4:

Let’s imagine you’re Ed Balls, and you’ve told councils they can build some playgrounds, when you know you haven’t got the money.

You’re an idiot. You’re a liar. You’re Ed Balls. You’ve mislead local authorities about something that you knew could never happen. That’s callous savagery. That’s obnoxious maliciousness of the variety that marks Balls to his very core.

Perhaps worse, it’s the kind of rank incompetence that Ballsites apologists such as yourself cling to, and that brought the UK to the brink of bankruptcy in the first place.

@5:

The point is, that it was £235 million that Labour DID NOT HAVE. You can’t spend money that doesn’t exist, but you try telling Ed Balls that.

@7

Don’t be silly. For one thing, everyone spends money they “don’t have” whenever they use a credit card; for another, Labour had different tax plans than the Cons. If this £235m is sooo important, why not ask David Cameron (est. wealth – £40 million) and Zac Goldsmith (est. wealth – £200 million) and the rest of the millionaires in the cabinet to chip in? After all, we’re constantly being told by your lot that we’re in this together, right? Well the poor have already seen plans for benefit cuts, schoolkids have seen plans for new schools ripped up, women have seen funding for refuges cut, old people have seen their pension schemes changed – maybe the rich and powerful could take a hit for the financial crisiss that they put us in now?

There is an argument that dedicated play spaces are a bad idea, because all public spaces of a city/town/village should be available for children to play in.

For “their safety”, however, they are corralled away rather than being allowed to play in their streets, allowing cars to drive faster and allowing the car to dominate urban life.

http://www.ecoplan.org/children/general/tranter.htm

@9

Perhaps, but a lot of these play areas were going to be nearer to where people with children lived that their current circumstances. It’s all very well harkening back to some golden age of playing in the street but times they have a-changed – round my way we’ve been trying to get a 15mph limit for the residential areas and crazed petrolheads keep harping on as if it’s a human right to be able to kill a child with two tonnes of steel. So it’s not as easy as saying “let’s go back to playing in the street” and that’s what this programme was going to be tackling by giving children somewhere safe to play.

@8
damn straight.

Classic tory ploy, sell playing fields to your mates or refuse to fund playgrounds because you can’t be arsed collecting £15bn in owed taxes off your mates – force kids either into their bedrooms to grow obese and unhealthy or onto the streets where they cause ‘a nuisance’. Finally, ring into radio 5 and bemoan the ‘state of youth today’.

Hey presto, a manufactured pretext.

Lets keep this in proportion. No-one is selling anything according to this story; what is happening is various playgrounds that had been approved under the last government will now not be built because there is no money.

For those using the analogy of credit cards (which I tend only to use when I have the money to cover them in my account – overdrafts however…) the analogy doesn’t work when you realise the credit card is already maxed out. You can’t responsibly just go and get another card and start spending on that as well.

There is of course the option of raising taxes rather than making cuts, but Labour did plan cuts as well. So schemes like this would likely have been cut under Labour as well – just a year later.

Still using the Labour lexicon of a reduced increase being a cut I see

@13

We could play the “what if” game forever and get nowhere, but anyhoo, Labour had planned for cuts next year it’s true but the assumption was that the economy would be picking up by then so schemes like this – considering it’s such a paltry sum in the grand scheme of things – may not have been axed. Also Cameron has already said that the cuts are here to stay so it’s not like things like this will come back once the money is rolling around the circus again.
And yeh the credit card analogy probably was bad but I was making the point that everyone spends money they don’t have (ask the 70% of the country with a mortgage, for example) a credit card is just one of those ways.

Typical Labour spin. They use nice words like “play”, but we know that every one of those roundabouts is a quango in disguise. The shear beaurocracy of Hop Skip and Jump is just another example of what broke Britain. Once again it comes down to the Tories to clean up the financial disaster that Labour has left beside those swings.
The children will discover the joys of the private sector can easily fill the gap left by the removal of the sandpit.