I am always amazed by voter loyalty. I guess it is a bit like buying into a known brand that lots of others buy. It feels safe in a group and not everyone can be wrong, can they? Similarly, some people support a football club however badly they perform, what ever the disastrous consequences for a Saturday afternoon.

Those that vote Labour seem particularly loyal and appear to see things through rose tinted spectacles. I guess Labour supporters buy into the redistribution of wealth concept. Take money from those that have it and give it to those that don’t.

Higher taxes on the wealthy and middle income earners to support those on benefits is the plan. This plays into the cliche of the working class marching to London for a job which at the time would have been appropriate but now is not. The old class wars are dead. We have a huge and growing middle ( no ) class.

The Union led Labour Party would try to convince us that everyone is downtrodden and unsuccessful. This is very far from the truth. The vast majority in this country are proud to be independently supporting their families, working to better themselves and see opportunity not negativity.

So, if Labour still see redistribution of wealth as a key aim what about wealth creation to fund it? I can’t see a plan. In fact when you get past the increasingly weak cost of living argument I don’t see anything at all.

All party’s want everybody to be better off. Why wouldn’t they? So what is the Labour plan to achieve this? All I can see is redistribution which in itself does nothing to generate wealth, worse it obstructs it.

Let’s look at Ed Balls record and see how he helped generate wealth for this county.

As an advisor to Gordon Brown, Balls encouraged the annual £5 Billion raid on private and company pension funds (Oct 1997). This directly affected all those who rely on pensions since that date. I conclude Ed Balls sees all pensioners as wealthy and needed to have that taken off them as redistribution.

Then he encouraged Brown to sell our gold reserves (having notified the market first) at the lowest prices, losing our country the equivalent of £11 Billion. That is a lot of money and seemed to have no basis except to cover up excessive spending by the Labour government. It potentially weakened our credit rating which could have increased interest rates for everyone including the young trying to buy a house.

Then Ed Balls encouraged local councils to double their council tax, introduced the fuel duty escalator, increased over one hundred and eleven other taxes.

None of which generated any additional wealth. So, Mr Balls, if you want to redistribute wealth you need to find a way of generating it first and a high tax, business unfriendly environment is not the way to do it.