This shotgun marriage of minds between Labour and the Tories won’t last

It just might be that out of the shouting at Prime Minister’s Questions, the sallies and charges, a set of sensible fiscal and financial policies is emerging.

The leader of the opposition is right: Labour is planning to cut capital spending in half in the next few years. The Prime Minister is also right: the cuts result from a decision to bring forward into these recession years spending that had been planned for what policymakers call ‘the out years’. That decision inflates spending this year, but will reduce it in later years, unless when the time comes Brown can’t bring himself to ‘cut’, which might be the reason he has cancelled next year’s comprehensive spending review.

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Meanwhile, Brown is right: if you look at a several-year total, he is not cutting spending, and the Tories are right that if you compare later years with this one, he is indeed doing just that.