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Wednesday, 9th December 2009

One thing to remember today

Peter Hoskin 11:55am

As you can probably imagine, plenty of Labour folk are getting excited about the PBR today.  They regard it as a chance for their party to harden their rise in the polls, and hasten the Tories' descent.  But Danny Finkelstein strikes a necessary note of calm over at Comment Central.  As he puts it, a Budget in which the government has to 'fess up to the horrible state of the public finances is hardly going to do much good for them.  

To Danny's analysis I'd add one supporting fact: that rarely, if ever, in recent times, has the government received a significant poll bounce on the back of a Budget.  I blogged about this back in April, and Anthony Wells followed it up with an excellent post here.  Of course, there's always room for exceptions to the rule, but it's certainly not looking hopeful for Brown today.

Filed under: Conservatives (2312 more articles) , Gordon Brown (918 more articles) , Labour (2143 more articles) , Polls (286 more articles) , Pre-Budget Report (45 more articles) , UK politics (5406 more articles)

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Publius

December 9th, 2009 12:05pm Report this comment

It's a shame I can't turn to the Speccie for the note of calm you mention, instead of all this panicked headless-chicken hysteria.

Chris

December 9th, 2009 12:54pm Report this comment

It's a pity a few people at the Spectator don't read and inwardly digest Daniel Finkelstein's comments on the irrelevance of UKIP.

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