Labour is being forced to talk about ‘good borrowing’ before it is ready

It’s not a case of will they, won’t they when it comes to whether Labour would borrow more, but will they admit it and try to sell this plan to voters? In the past few days, we’ve seen the party trying to work this out in public. Ed Miliband, in his awkward World at One interview, knew that saying ‘yes, we’d borrow more to fund the VAT cut’ would provoke triumphant howls from his opponents, and so ended up nervously jabbering away as Martha Kearney asked the same question over and over again. But yesterday he told Daybreak that ‘I am clear about this: a temporary cut in VAT, as we are proposing, would lead to a temporary rise in borrowing’. He added that ‘I suppose I felt it was rather a commonplace’ to make that clear the first time around. This morning, on the Today programme, Harriet Harman repeated that ‘commonplace’:

‘I’m saying for part of our programme, it would need to be financed by a temporary increase in borrowing, for temporary measures.