That's not what my lad Stephen Bush said in the e-mail this morning - and I always listen to Stephen Bush.
(He is better at thinking than me, so I just let him think for me now.)
>Rishi Sunak will announce the biggest expansion in government borrowing in British political history as he approves a slew of infrastructure projects in his budget today, as he takes advantage of the era of low interest rates.
>And they're getting lower: the Bank of England has cut rates to 0.25 per cent in a boost to help the economy see its way through a covid-19 induced economic shock.
>Those two stories illustrate the benefit and the cost of the era of low low interest rates: on the one hand, governments can borrow more than they could in the past. The way that the British government structures its debt means that it may have even great wriggle room than many other states. But the downside is that when you hit an economic downturn, pretty much all the heavy lifting has to be done by fiscal policy, that is, through tax-and-spend.
>That reality is one reason why Sunak may be wise to avoid too much borrowing outside of infrastructure spending and measures to respond to the crisis - and that for all the talk of ending austerity, and the reality of increased spending for police, the NHS and education, the story for large parts of the public realm today will be the continuation of spending restraint rather than its end.
It's good to see them investing again, and you can certainly see this as a bit of a vindication to Labour's "we won the argument" mantra.
I can't help but feel like it's a bit late though. It's all well and good pledging money for infrastructure when most of it will just go into fixing the damage ten years of neglect has caused.
They absolutely are fucked, but not because the Tories have nicked their politics. It's because Labour will do what they always do and piss about trying to position themselves as opposed to all of it, instead of standing up and saying "See? They've admitted we were right all along!" and driving that point home.
