Wrestling over cuts

Britain’s economic debate has been reduced to WWE-style wrestling, where two figures adopt semi-comic personas and have at each other for the entertainment of the crowd — while not doing any real fighting at all. So it is with Osborne and Balls. Rhetorically, they are poles apart; one championing cuts, the other spending. But you’ll notice that neither quantifies the cuts. That’s because Osborne is simply enacting an only-slightly-souped-up version of Darling’s plan and the real difference between the two parties is tiny. This was the point of last night’s Newsnight, where David Grossman filed a report (in which yours truly was interviewed) about the great pretend fight between two parties whose plans only differ by less than 1 per cent a year. Labour’s plans would have involved 2.2 per cent average cuts to government departments per year. The coalition’s figure is 3 per cent:

And, what’s more, the below graph shows how his government is increasing debt by 51 per cent – more than Labour managed in 13 years.