Bringing down the Balls Wall

Thousands of people have had a go at knocking down the Wall of Ed Balls. And yet it still stands!

They even have a special place for this great manly challenge - the floor of the House of Commons.

See those bleary-eyed, late-night educationalists, glued to their TVs, watching the great Wall of Ed Balls lump up yet again to deliver yet another Education bill? As Nick Gibb, the little con from Bognor Regis and Littlehampton points out, it's another year! There must be another Education bill! Listen to everyone involved in the practice of education cheer.

Look at them, poor sods, hunched before the embers, sipping on their late night cocoa, watching the debate of the Second Reading, hoping that this time the Balls Wall truly comes tumbling down.

Will anyone do it? Will anyone hammer through? The Balls Wall tactic is to stand up, framed in that enormous rectangle grey tarmac suit, and fill the small stage with the great concrete breeze blocks of impenetrable Blokey Wall. When the Balls Wall speaks, it uses a great big voice with the endings missing on all its words, so it sounds like pipe hammer, bang-bang-banging away at the side of your head.

But first, bring on the lightweights to try their strength!

Here comes the weedy con, Andrew Selous of Bedfordshire South-West. He squeaks as a governor of a Church of England primary school who wants to talk about sex teaching.

Pah! The big Balls Wall bats away small distractions like that, because the Wall says everyone wants kids to know about sex, so the concrete government is already doing that and everyone supports that! Yeah! Even all those people who do not support it. They support it too, because as everyone knows, if they use a double not in a sentence it really means yes.

John Hemming, the LD for Birmingham Yardley, tries to throw his weight about with a cracking joke pulled out of the hat with his line, 'It is clear that there is little support for the details of the Government's proposals.'

This blinder had the Balls Wall jiggling up and down looking like a great chugging Wall in motion. It showed it has a rough, urban, graffiti humour breeze block or two, because it became all matey in a laddish, rectangular way, a bit like Fred Flintstone but without the charm, saying the best way to get a result was indeed to piss everyone off.

But those educationalists sitting at home had more to come.

Michael Gove, the con of Surrey Heath, who looks like someone inflated a balloon in his head, tried a different tack. He tried to destabilise the Balls Wall with a lot of tricky questions. What that means in the context of this and does it mean this and that and then when it doesn't does it mean something else?

These were designed to outwit the Wall and bring it crashing down, when all they achieved was to make the balloon-head sound full of helium. So really he should have livened it up for the poor sod bloodshot-eyed educationalists, and thrown in some curve ball questions like Hey, Ballsy Wallsy! Does it mean you have shitforbrains and shitfordinner?

Feisty Mr. Nick Gibb came out ducking, weaving and fancy-footing again, trying to poke the Balls Wall with a bony pointy finger; trying to gouge out little powdery holes round the brickwork, complaining with stabby stabby attacks on the proposed primary education of 'a programme of study with 84 objectives stab stab running from E1 to E24 stab stab from M1 to M29, and from L1 to L31 stab stab'.

Nothing like this will affect the Balls Wall of course. Only running at the Balls Wall with a big bag marked BOMB might do that.

Hero Graham Stuart did that, but first he ripped off his manly double-breasted grey worsted suit, pulled his great crumple-free polyester mix BHS shirt asunder with his mighty ripply biceps, then delivered a speech that left the home educating ladies and gentlemen of England swooning equally into their late night cocoa.

He spoke of all the things that make England the gloriously maverick, individual, eccentric, off-beat and downright nutty place it is, resistant to the concrete breeze blocks of Labour education policy. He spoke of the duty, commitment, loyalty and pride of the ordinary non-school choosing folk of England. He asked, 'Ministers should ask themselves whether they want to bring such help to families who are so adamant that they do not want to receive it.' Now there was a warning to the Balls Wall that defiant bloody mindedness would stay fast to the last ditch of England.

But did it work? Did anything bring down the great Balls Wall?

It is a true fact that none of this, no blasted cannon shot, no stabby skeletal finger, no excoriating armoured attack, no Superman, nothing, will yet have any effect on the blustering Balls Wall.

It does what it always does. It stands up, expands its own concrete chest, and offers everyone pork pies made of statistics, and these numbers go on and on relentlessly, bang-bang-bang, and they sum up 1,600 schools, 30 per cent of pupils, five exams, one hundred per cent more boxes to tick, two hundred per cent more bits of paper to pass around, 45 teachers bludgeoned half to death, 116 spineless heads and only one bully boys like Balls.

And do you know, says the Wall, soon there will be 12 resisting, and then only eight, and by 2011 there will be no resistance left on planet Earth because all resistance against the Wall is pointless!