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Balls Shows Deft Touches, But Gets Kicks Too

Dealt a tough hand, Ed Balls played it as deftly as he could.

Facing an audience in which there were plenty of business people , the shadow chancellor highlighted at every opportunity how Labour would keep Britain in the EU.

This is widely seen as the most business-friendly policy of a party otherwise seen as hostile to wealth creators.

Mr Balls, a noted Atlanticist, pressed home time and again how, on his recent visits to the United States, politicians and business people were astonished at the very notion that Britain, should the Conservatives be re-elected, will hold a referendum on EU membership.

He told Ian Allen, a senior executive of General Motors in the UK: "They couldn't believe it… I would like to see us do better but to walk away from the biggest single market on our doorstep?

"People in America say to me that they want to be in Britain selling into that market. To walk away from Europe would be risky and dangerous."

Later in the session, though, Mr Balls was also careful to strike a more Eurosceptic note aimed at any watching Labour voters who may be flirting with UKIP.

His condemnation of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy as "hugely wasteful" could just as easily have come from George Osborne's mouth.

Similarly, in discussing the High Speed 2 rail link between London and the north of England, Mr Balls was impressively bipartisan, stressing that his only differences with the Government were on the fact that the latter was moving more slowly in building an east-west rail link in the North.

These were not the only areas in which Mr Balls sought to make common ground with Mr Osborne.

When asked about how he would help more first-time buyers get on the housing ladder, the shadow chancellor talked expansively on the need to build new houses, while also highlighting how he was at odds with members and activists of his own party.

"I don't want to be telling people they can't buy their own homes," he said.

All this was aimed at reassuring watching business people, small and medium business owners and entrepreneurs that Labour is not as anti-business as it appears.

As someone who is instinctively in favour of free markets and supportive of business, Mr Balls looked comfortable here.

Arguably his best moment was when he outlined how Labour would tackle the current failings of the business rates system - detailing how, rather than cut corporation tax as the Government intends, he would cut business rates and then freeze them for 1.5 million small businesses.

He claims this would deliver an average tax cut of £470 for each small business.

Mr Balls also noted how the likes of Sainsbury's and Next were "competing against online retailers with warehouses outside Britain", adding: "We have a view of commerce that's quite 20th century."

This will have gone down well with business people.

Mr Balls was on less steady ground in areas where Labour is deemed vulnerable, notably when invited to apologise for the state in which his party left the economy in 2010.

The shadow chancellor insisted he had apologised for lax regulation of the banking system but then sought to blame the travails of the last few years on the collapse of Lehman Brothers and its aftermath.

It was best summed up with this comment: "When Lehman went bankrupt it was a global crisis that started in America but at its root was regulation."

Mr Balls' contrition might have been more convincing had he simply said: "Yes, after 16 years of unbroken economic growth, it would have been better for Britain to have gone into the downturn running budget surpluses instead of deficits."

He was as disingenuous in insisting that the last Labour government was starting to address Britain's long-term housing shortage before the financial crisis got in the way.

The shadow chancellor was equally unconvincing in trying to justify the mansion tax, an impost regarded by most independent analysts and economists as deeply flawed.

He was asked about comments from Jim Murphy, the leader of the Labour Party in Scotland, that the mansion tax would be paid largely by homeowners in London to pay for more doctors and nurses in Scotland.

It would have been good, as a supplementary question, for someone to have asked Mr Balls whether it is fair to levy the mansion tax on people who own one home worth £2m but not on those people who own several homes that are worth £2m in total but that do not individually add up the that figure. MPs, for example.