Government Figures

Imagine any sort of organisation which has to account to members for where the money has gone - it might be a company or partnership, a golf club or the Church Fete. What would you expect to receive? As a very minimum, I should have thought, how much money came in (and where it came from) and how much went out (and where it went). And there are laws governing exactly this, in every aspect of life except government. Alastair Darling's statement, the Comprehensive Spending Review (or perhaps Revue since it has been a bit of an act) takes a long long time to get through (and costs £54) and really leaves you none the wiser. The last chancellor who gave both income and expenditure statements at the same time was Norman Lamont, but his were done on different bases anyway and so worthless. The only thing you can be certain of is that you will be kept in the dark.

What we do know is that growth appears to be slowing and that both the government deficit and the borrowing levels are right at the top of where they should be. Odd, this: Gordon Brown used to state clearly that government finances should be balanced over the economic cycle. This means running a deficit when times are bad and a surplus when they are good. To keep to this, Gordon even changed the definition of the economic cycle a while back, but even so he appears to have broken his own rule: things have been booming (he never tires of telling us so) and so we should be in surplus. But we're not.

What this means is that even if the government squeezes its revised figures into its revised definition of the economic cycle, we have no leeway. The extra money for education had to come from borrowings. So we have nothing left to fall back on if times get harder.

And times are getting harder. Already people are talking about a drop in house prices. This will make homeowners less free with their money, and they are in any case up to their ears in debt, so spending will fall, unemployment will begin to rise again and increased welfare payments will test the government's finances further. When Brown was riding high on the back of the previous government's prudence he often used to lecture us and his foreign counterparts on exactly this: 'the costs of economic failure'. Now his chickens are coming home to roost. He said there will be no spending without reform but he has poured money into unreformed public services, which are still awful; all that has happened is salaries have risen, Labour voting staff have been taken on.

It's time to tighten our belts; and Brown must fight an election in 2 years or so. He must be hoping we all have short memories. But I think he will be bitterly regretting his timidity about going to the country this Autumn.