The real problem with Rachel Reeves’s Budget fiddle 

Remember Gordon Brown’s ‘golden rule’ – that over the course of the economic cycle the only net borrowing he would allow was to fund investment? As for current spending, he told us, he would pay down debt in the good times so that he could borrow in the bad. It sounded reassuring, until Brown started to fiddle with the figures in every conceivable way. He shunted debt off the public balance sheet via private finance initiatives. 

He kept stretching out his idea of the economic cycle, so it seemed that we would never get to the end of it, obviating the need ever to balance the books. As for investment, he kept broadening his definition of that, too, so that virtually anything counted. Schools, hospitals, welfare – it was all about investing in people.