Hammond may regret breaking his promise to eliminate the deficit

As Nick Clegg, George HW Bush and many other politicians have proved to their cost, manifesto promises matter. How damaging, then, will Philip Hammond’s brazen abandonment of the 2017 Conservative pledge be, whereby financial discipline was supposed to ‘guide us to a balanced budget by the middle of next decade’? Now, Hammond seems to be trying to tell us that running a public deficit doesn’t really matter. While George Osborne delayed and delayed the date he promised to bring the public finances back into balance, Hammond has apparently abandoned any idea of ever doing so. There is now no target for eliminating the deficit at all.

It is hardly as if there was any pressure on the Chancellor to drop his manifesto promise – as he says, public borrowing has come in lower this year than was forecast a year ago. He could have stuck to his spending plans and brought forward the elimination of the deficit.