Alan Johnson’s economic gamble

The most shameless line of Alan Johnson’s big speech came at the beginning. “Being in opposition does not mean pretending to be in government,” he averred, “we will not be producting a shadow spending review.” Which would be fair enough, were it not for one simple fact: the Brown government didn’t produce a spending review when one was due, last year, either.

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In which case, Labour’s new economic policy is much like their old one. They are sticking by the Alistair Darling plan to halve the deficit over this Parliament, which is encouraging given some of the alternatives. Yet there is still not much detail about how this might actually be achieved. As he has done over the past few days, Johnson riffed on about increasing the taxes on banks. And he set out a few “tough choices” on welfare spending.