Ringfence-a-rama

Just watching Newsnight, and the show’s economics editor, Paul Mason, has said we can expect several budgets to be ringfenced from spending cuts in tomorrow’s PBR – hospitals, schools and perhaps even the social security budget.  If so, it’s another sign of how political the document is set to be.  Ringfenced budgets are the other side of the soak-the-rich coin: sending out the twin message that Labour will batter the “City fat cats,” while also “investing” in public services “for the many”.  Just a shame that it’s all insufficient to the scale of the debt crisis.