Ed Balls has just delivered Labour’s Budget briefing. His main point was that the
Office of Budget Responsibility now forecasts higher levels of unemployment than it did last autumn. He claimed that this would lead to a £12.6bn increase in spending on unemployment benefit.
He also argued that the decision to increase tax thresholds by CPI rather than RPI was an effective tax increase and that it will hit the middle hardest.
In a classic piece of Ballsian mischief, he reveled in pointing out that the Office of Budget Responsibility says that it received news of the extra cut in corporation tax and the 1p cut in fuel duty too late to add to its model. Balls tried to extrapolate from this that the government must have reached for these measures in a last minute panic. But Treasury sources maintain that those measures, along with the whole Budget, were signed off by the quad of Cameron, Clegg, Alexander and Osborne last Thursday.
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