Chris

The thing is Damien, if you go and look for any of the independent analysis out there (i.e. avoid any of the national Press because it's all partisan as hell right now), the one thing it seems to agree on is that £6 billion isn't very much. In fact it is within the margin of error for a treasury forecast. It is an amount small enough that in certain contexts it may not even exist after all.

Furthermore, it's not even about cuts to services. There are going to be cuts, deep ones, regardless of who wins this election. Gordon Brown raked in billions during the boom times and simply peed it up the wall, so when the hard times came he had no choice but to mortgage all our futures for decades to come. My children will still be servicing that debt when they start earning and paying tax. That makes me angry.

The important issue here is the ideological difference that has been exposed between Gordon Brown and David Cameron. Brown has let it slip that he doesn't consider that money to even be in the economy unless it's the Government that's spending it. That is a dangerously Statist view of an economy. Governments are slow and inefficient. They do not create wealth. All they can hope to do is legislate for the conditions that will allow private citizens to get on and create wealth.

A Labour Government will not, cannot, create those conditions because it is hard-wired to believe that only it can spend money in a way that will get the economy moving, despite the evidence of the last decade, which is that a Labour Government can at best only preside over a booming economy when it is handed to them on a plate and only for as long as the wind remains fair.