Strangely, both sides at Treasury questions today wanted to talk about something that does their own party no favours at all to mention. The Labour whips had sent their loyal backbenchers out in force to ask about Friday’s borrowing figures, while George Osborne and Conservative colleagues were very happy indeed to talk about how much the Opposition would have to borrow, too.
Labour wanted to tell off the government for borrowing more. The government wanted to remind Labour that it would borrow even more.
When it comes to performing elaborate and quite painful-looking contortions, Ed Balls is a master, but even he must realise that telling off another party for borrowing quite a bit when your own plans would have you borrowing even more, while trying to make an argument for ‘good borrowing’ for capital projects vs ‘bad borrowing’ for day-to-day spending, is really very difficult to pull off. You can barely fit the thing in a sentence, let alone a coherent political strategy.
Nevertheless, he clearly thought it was worth a shot, telling the Chamber:
‘The reason is, for all the Budget speech bluster, borrowing last year didn’t go down, it went up, Mr Speaker.
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