The economic cycle is the construct used by the Chancellor to justify his plans

The economic cycle is the construct used by the Chancellor to justify his plans The budget must balance over the cycle The Treasury says the cycle will finish in March 2004. This is not the time or place to debate the point, but all philosophers agree that the economic cycle is only apparent after it’s finished The cycle is entirely unpredictable Perhaps that’s what’s suddenly occurring to them now. A simple housing crash, for instance, would cause such a slump in consumer spending that all forecasts would be worthless.Michael Howard, the shadow Chancellor, led a boisterous attack on the Chancellor’s forecasts and assumptions, and even more cheerfully, on the Chancellor “There they sit. What a shambles, what a shower! Brown and Blair, the posturing pair!” The Sketch cannot condone any form of rudeness, but it was oddly refreshing to hear a full-blooded, mocking, confident attack on the Government; it reminded us how little full-blooded, confident mockery we’d heard from the Tories. Mr Howard needs another important job and William Hague must return to the front bench to shadow Mr Brown.We learnt many interesting things, nonetheless.

Forty per cent of the Government’s first targets were missed; in their second tranche of targets, 75 per cent were missed. Productivity growth has halved, half a million manufacturing jobs had gone and the stock market has fallen far more in Britain than anywhere else in the west. And (children look away now) had the Chancellor not put £100bn of liabilities off the balance sheet we’d already have a debt to GDP ratio of over 40 per cent Yes, now you’re really shocked. I better stop before I cause a housing market crash.simoncarr75 hotmail
More from Simon Carr. There are times, in retrospect, when the first Blair term looks like a dress rehearsal for real politics.

There were big moments of course, the Belfast agreement and Kosovo foremost among them, just as Iraq looms now, its high moment of danger perhaps no more than weeks away. But on the home front, the crises, spats and wobbles of that era now seem lilliputian in comparison with the tests ahead. Those, illuminating as they were, were about the process rather than the substance of politics: spin, overzealous fundraising from business, control freakery, an approach to the press at times informed by shameless populism. The post-spin age beckons, not only because spin became counterproductive but because it seems irrelevant to the scale of what the Government has to contend with between now and the next general election.

Neither the customarily impressive array of initiatives for enterprise, for pensioners or for world poverty announced by Gordon Brown yesterday, nor the chronic electoral weakness of the Opposition, can disguise the fact that the gears of real political economy are now fully engaged.Dangers either loom or are already present, among them a firefighters’ strike, which the Chancellor yesterday rightly reminded MPs, as forcibly as he has yet done, that the Government cannot afford to lose. The no doubt fraught debate, first and foremost between the Chancellor and the Prime Minister, on whether Britain should enter the euro is real and, at long last, inescapable. And most real of all is the question, linked to both the first two, of whether the Government’s economic record, unmatched by any previous Labour administration, can be sustained.On the last and most electorally fundamental of these questions, Mr Brown’s presentation yesterday exposed not a scintilla of doubt, self-directed or otherwise. Anybody who expected him to come to the dispatch box yesterday in a mood of humility about his downward revision of the growth forecast and his upward revision of borrowing plans, misunderstands not just the man but perhaps the nature of modern politics.While it is a given that every politician of the front rank in every government blames world factors for the bad news and takes exclusive credit for the good, Mr Brown was certainly at his most persuasive in attributing a revision of the forecasts – a revision that he did not explicitly mention, preferring instead simply to announce the new figures as though there was nothing out of the ordinary – to a stagnant global economy.