David Cameron will today accuse Labour of lacking credibility. As we’re on the subject, it’s worth looking at the credibility of the PM when it comes to the three big pledges he made in 2010.
We know most of what’s going to be in the Autumn Statement. But here’s what the chancellor won’t tell you today.
Miliband will say that Britain needs a recovery for working people if the government is to ‘squeeze the deficit and not the middle’.
The parties’ spending plans are becoming stranger and stranger.
Income tax receipts in particular have been weaker than expected.
Labour can make a compelling argument that the economic crisis in the UK was not principally its fault but the result of an international banking crisis with its roots in the US.
According to the latest ONS borrowing figures, the deficit for April was £6.3bn, around £2bn lower than expected. Public sector net borrowing for the previous year (2012/13) was revised down from £120.6bn to £119.5bn (compared to a deficit of £120.9bn in 2011/12).
As Ed Conway has noticed, if you exclude the effects of either Northern Rock asset reclassification or the profits of the SLS from today’s public sector borrowing figures, the deficit was actually higher this year than last.
Economic data is coming thick and fast. Sandwiched between last week’s poor unemployment data and Thursday’s forthcoming results for GDP in the first quarter of the year, public finance figures were published today. They show that George Osborne has dodged a bullet.
Government borrowing will overshoot the chancellor’s target by £8bn this financial year, according to predictions published today by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
