The latest official borrowing statistics were released earlier today, and – thanks to a few revisions, detailed by Paul Waugh here – they’re slightly lower than you might expect. Not that the numbers aren’t still massive. Public sector net borrowing between April and October stood at £37 billion – bringing the total over the economic cycle up to £640.9 billion, or 42.9 percent of GDP. While, crucially, net borrowing for October was 1.4 billion – the first time that there hasn’t been a net repayment in October since 1994. And that’s even when leaving, say, PFI liabilities and the bank bailout off the balance sheet, as is Brown’s want.
Now, all this does represent a “borrowing binge,” as Cameron and Osborne put it. But, on that front, the numbers will be considerably more damning in the months after the PBR. In the meantime, it could be Brown and Darling themselves who most undermine the Government’s borrow-borrow-borrow-spend-spend-spend narrative. The stories about a split between No.10 and No.11 are gathering pace. And whilst the source of tension may be over how much to borrow to fund tax cuts – rather than over whether tax cuts should be funded by borrowing – the Tories will be hoping that it comes across as internal Labour doubt over their own economic platform. Whether the split story has stuck will probably be shown by the column inches it garners in the Sundays. Watch this space.
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