Brown primes his new dividing line

With Brown shifting his position on spending by the minute, it’s worth highlighting this snippet from today’s Guardian:

“Treasury ministers, in particular, believe they can look at whether there will be a need for cuts at the time of the pre-budget report in the autumn. They intend to use the report to show the scale of projected future savings, as well as how frontline services and new priorities can be protected by switching resources.

Labour still believes the Tories have made a political mistake by committing themselves to public spending cuts so early.”

It rather supports Fraser’s prediction that, following all their talk about “envelopes” and “projections,” the Government will suddenly start saying those “cuts” aren’t necessary after all.  But it also suggests that they’ll try to establish another dividing line: one between limited Labour cuts (which will be called “savings”) and Tory cuts (which will be called “cuts,” and caricatured as impacting “frontline services”).