IMO the most surprising part of todays statement was the Chancellor now talking of his five year target to balance the books as a rolling five year target.

He made a lot of how he had got Britain "out of the danger zone" with his commitment to remove the deficit by the end of the parliament, in his Emergency Budget in 2010. Now the Office for Budget Responsibility - which he set up, to be independent from the government and produce the figures - has produced figures that say there is still going to be a deficit in 2015. So his plans are based on balancing the books five years from now. This rolling target of course means you never actually have to balance the books, you just have to set a budget every year that plans to balance the books in five years time based on the forecasts you have available.

This is the same as Gordon Brown's "Golden Rule" that there would be no deficit over the 'economic cycle', you can run a deficit from year to year as long as your plans show it will come in to balance at a date in the future.

I wonder whether Osborne will still get this 'market credibility' now that the markets find his plan isn't actually to balance the books by 2015, but on a rolling five year basis including time after the next election when it might be a different government anyway.

Also the latest figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility must make him cringe at the fact he called the March 2011 budget "A Budget for Growth". It's like when Clive Woodward released a book called "Winning" when he was coach of the Lions on tour to New Zealand and they lose every game. There is no growth. Also didn't he spend the last election talking about Labour's legacy of failure, with 7.9% unemployment. The OBR now says it will be 8.7% next year.

The worst thing is, even all today's gloomy news and gloomy forecasts is based on the assumption that there is not a meltdown in the Eurozone in the new year, which there might well be. If there is then the UK is going to be in a worse situation than 2008, and the public finances will be in a much worse state. Given how much Osborne goes on about retaining AAA credit rating, taking the focus of the bond markets off the UK and having a credible plan to remove the deficit I think his position might be untenable if there is a Eurozone collapse, because we may well see the AAA rating go next year, see bond markets start to doubt the solvency of the UK government and a recession will push the deficit back up where it was at the last election.

Cameron says the effects of 2008 were much worse than anyone envisaged and that's why we're not seeing growth.
Translation : We didn't listen, we tried to cut too far, too fast and we choked-off what growth there could have been.

Osborne says that borrowing is coming down.
Translation : Borrowing is going up, dramatically.

They both say that We're all in it together.
Translation : You're all in it together.

I agree with what you say but what makes you think he will cringe or consider his position untenable? He will believe his own propaganda and think he has been right all along regardless.

When his five year plan became a rolling five year plan even the political commentators are saying that if you read the small print of what he said originally this is not actually breaking his word. Cameron was not so guarded as Nick Robinson on the BBC web site pointed out yesterday as he categorically said the books will balance by 2015.

Still, everyone including the markets took 2015 as a deadline not a rolling target but I have this vision of Osborne going over the small print of what he said previously and when he and his officials worked out he could have this rolling deadline without technically going back on his word them all jumping up and saying "HA! Got it!" with a smug look on his face. Never mind the country is going down the tubes he has covered his back so he can drink at the trough a while longer.

Truth is - there is no answer and anyone who says they have it is lying.

Truth is - there is no such thing as an "investment", only when you read the small print do you realise that the word "investment" does not mean that your money will magically increase while you sit and watch it.

Truth is - politicians speak bollax and tinker with things for three or four years and never look beyond that timespan, the house of commons is full of people who are in the job for the short term and financial benefits and with only a few exceptions have no great plans for society as a whole, its a job, no more no less.

Yup.
He is not as thick as people make out.
While people are distracted by the debate over his economic wisdom or lack of it ... he is ploughing on with his real agenda, which is to put the low paid in their place, i.e. broke and broken, to ensure that he and his echelon sit nice and comfy.
I haven't seen such clear-cut class war since the 1970s.

Short termism is the greatest failing of UK governments since the second world war. Some had long term vision like when Labour set up the NHS but in the modern era I don't think there has been one bit of significant long term plan that all parties push forward cutting across political lines.

The last attempt was care for the elderly but even that got scuppered when the Tories walked away from a cross party deal.

I think it all stems from entrenched political ideology that in the past did mean the incoming government ripping up much of what the last lot did. Maggie Thatcher for all her failings introduced the idea you could not spend a parliament undoing what was done so she allowed the grammar schools to continue to be replaced by comprehensives for example.

Unfortunately her government was just as bad in other areas as all the rest with a good example being BNOC (British National Oil Corporation) which was set up by Tony Benn to do a similar job to StatOil in Norway and make sure the country benefited from North sea oil. In Norway now as a result of StatOil there is no problem with pensions for anyone in the country. They have not got millions on strike because the government wants to cut pensions. Poverty in old age in Norway is gone. They have billions from StatOil's work in their state pension scheme.

In contrast Nigel Lawson sold BNOC off so in the UK private companies have raked in the revenue instead. Lawson and other Tories will say by letting the private companies have their way the markets will have ensured we will benefit because they provide jobs and tax revenue indirectly. The Norwegian experience shows you the markets can be easily beaten with long term planning. It's the biggest example of short term idealogical thinking doing damage there is in this country IMO. To have been an oil producing nation for most of my life yet bei n this state when judicious use of oil revenues could have had so much benefit is criminal and short termism at its worst.

It is certainly true that first the 2008 banking crash and resulting recession and now the Euro crisis are being used as an excuse for polices that are purely ideological based. The biggest two are the end of free University education (sadly set on motion by Labour) and the "reform" of the NHS. They plough along with the latter arguing that even though the main task is the economy they do have a right to govern as they see fit i.e. by applying their ideology to in this case the NHS. If there had been no banking crisis and no Eurozone crisis I doubt they would have been able to press on with this at all.

The economy is a huge smoke screen for lots of other right-wing agenda's such as scrapping planning laws and as they tried to do sell the forests off. All done in the name of sorting the economy out.

Them having to backtrack over the forest sell off is interesting because at the time we had no Eurozone crisis and no strikes over pensions. People were not distracted. The current situation allows a lot of nasty stuff to be ignored.

It's a similar situation with the promised vote on the repeal of the hunting ban, now most hunts feel that there'll never be the promised vote before the end of this parliament. They're trotting out the excuse of "we need to concentrate on the economy" but in their own minds they must know that a free vote would go nowhere close to repealing the ban

I suspect that quite a few hunts will be "accidentally" killing foxes anyway ... "The pack all got the scent and, before we could stop them, they'd caught him".
What with local constabularies not having the resource to police them, and all.

The economic crisis is this government's very own 9/11.

Nothing gives a government carte blanche to screw its citizens over than a climate of fear, perpetuated by the myth that if they don't do exactly what they're told then something reeeeallly bad is going to happen to them.

Bush Jnr used 9/11 as an excuse to introduce PATRIOT and PATRIOT II, this lot are using the recession as an excuse to exercise class warfare.