Brown has stolen the next four Tory budgets. We’ll be paying off his debt for a generation

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics

Alistair Darling will stand at the Dispatch box on Wednesday and say that there is a plan to halve the Budget deficit in the next four years. His quiet delivery and demeanour of an Edinburgh lawyer will make this sound like a reassuring return to fiscal sanity. It is anything but. In reality, it means that the government intends to borrow another £500 billion — more than what the government spent in the whole of 2005 — over the next four years. Halving the deficit doesn’t mean making government expenditure match government revenue. It just means that the government will borrow less each year than it does now.

Labour are capitalising on the confusion between the word ‘deficit’ (i.e., government overspend) and ‘debt’ (i.e., the national overdraft). The two are completely different but the media, and so the public, regularly get confused between them. For instance, just this Tuesday, the seven o’clock news on the Today programme announced that the government had a plan to halve the debt in the next four years.