Peter Hoskin

Darling’s measured approach will drive Brown mad

I’ve just got around to reading Alistair Darling’s Mansion House speech from last night, and I’d recommend that CoffeeHousers flick through it too.  It’s a strange mix which takes some dechipering.  At first glance, there’s plenty of talk about “investment”; the doubling, tripling and quadrupling of budgets; and how “cutting spending across the board would choke off the recovery”.  But the overall emphasis – which, in turn, has become the emphasis of the newspaper coverage – is on bringing the public finances back into shape, and on lowering the debt burden.

It’s a speech which No.10 should welcome as it’s a not altogether unsuccessful refinement of the blunt “Labour investment vs Tory cuts” line: setting it in a framework of “tax increases for those that can afford them”, public service reform and waste-cutting.  Sure, not stuff that meets the challenge of the debt crisis – but politically smarter than yet another dividing line from the Dear Leader.  And that’s why, in the end, I imagine it will be rejected by Brown and Balls.  They’ll regard Darling’s more measured approach as a direct attack on their crass politics – and perhaps rightly so.

What we’re seeing now is a defining split in the government, and one which could fester more openly than the Blair-Brown divide ever did.  On one side, you’ve got Balls and Brown – who, you feel, are too far gone to back down from their crude dividing line now – and, on the other, an emboldened Chancellor whose rhetoric on “living within our means” somtimes chimes more closely with that of the Tories.  Expect fireworks around the next Pre-Budget Report, if not sooner.

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