Can I also recommend you look at this article by the Institute for Fiscal Studies' Robert Chote from March this year (before the delayed budget showed that the figures were worse than Alistair Darling had "believed" at the time of the Pre-Budget Report); here's a few extracts (my emphasis):
"the Pre-Budget Report also signalled a fiscal tightening - a combination of cuts in spending plans and tax increases - that would get under way next year and gradually increase to 2.6 per cent of national income, or around £38 billion a year in today's terms, by 2015-16.
...
... the fact that 80 per cent of the planned tightening comes in the form of cuts in projected public spending, compared with just a fifth from this and other tax increases. So the burden would fall primarily on the users of public services. By making it harder for the Conservatives to promise that they would outsqueeze him, Mr Brown may have narrowed the ground over which the parties will end up fighting, rather than widening it.
Public spending is now projected to grow by just 1.1 per cent a year on top of inflation over the next three-year spending review period, which begins in 2011-12 and is likely to cover most of the next Parliament. This is a much slower rate of increase than during Labour's years of plenty. What is more, most of this increase may be swallowed up by higher debt payments and social security bills, requiring spending on public services to be frozen in real terms on average.
Only a few Whitehall departments would enjoy real spending increases over this period. But even spending on health would fall as a share of national income after a period of unprecedented growth. The Government has already signalled that capital investment will be squeezed tighter than other spending, which suggests that transport, housing and the like might be relatively hard hit. "
So is Gordon Brown deliberately misleading the House and the Country? What do you think?
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