Brown urged to make "difficult choices" on spending

Over at the Progress website, a bunch of Labour MPs – including Peter Hain – have set out their “visions” ahead of the Budget. Broadly speaking, they’re all more or less in favour of further “fiscal stimlus” for one sector of the economy or another, but there are some alternative viewpoints too. By far the most interesting is Mark Todd’s article, entitled: “Some radical thinking and difficult choices are needed to nurse the public finances back to health”. His language is strident, and could even be taken as a direct attack on the Dear Leader’s management of the public finances:

“There are already signs that the scale of future deficits, unbacked as yet by clear strategies on how they may be corrected, are having an impact on the effectiveness of our short-term measures – seen in the dissonance between the Bank of England and government messages and bond market reactions.”

And he highlights the kind of forecasts which I imagine Brown would prefer to ignore:

“To make serious inroads into the deficit will require far more than annualised savings or economic recovery (especially bearing in mind the large tax takes from banking and the City on which we have relied and which may not return).