Courtesy of Paul Waugh and the Standard, the OBR projects there to be a £6bn budget surplus by 2015-16. There was no fanfare to herald this in George Osborne’s statement, which was a litany of dirge-like thanksgiving for catastrophe averted. The Treasury is now describing the figure as being ‘within the margin of error’, which is fluent Sir Humphrey-speak.
The Standard’s discovery is another example of the government deliberately hiding good economic news – in what Fraser terms Osborne’s Paul Daniels Act. Now why, I wonder, would a self-confessed tactical obsessive, who just happens to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer, be doing that?
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