Just like Gordon

Gordon Brown must be so proud of Alistar Darling, afer all his PBR is unravelling almost as quickly as a Gordon Brown budget. Even the BBC have to admit that:

"The pre-Budget report pledge to raise the state pension will not apply to some parts of the pension - potentially saving the Treasury £350m in 2010/11.

The Chancellor said the "basic state pension" would rise by 2.5% in April.

But pensions minister Angela Eagle says extras such as the State Earnings Related Pension (Serps) will be frozen.

She says this will prevent "unfairness" between Serps and company pension schemes. But a BBC report says other pension benefits will be frozen too.

Following the revelation by the BBC's Money Box programme, a Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) spokeswoman told the BBC a statement outlining the break-down of pension benefit increases and freezes would be issued on Monday.

Chancellor Alistair Darling gave his pledge in Wednesday's Pre-Budget report that "basic state pension will not be frozen, but will rise by 2.5% in April".

Nowhere did his speech or the hundreds of pages of pre-Budget documents mention the fact that the parts of the state pension which do not count as "basic" would be frozen."

Surely nobody can be surprised that a Labour Chancellor's official announcement is not entirely accurate, after all they do have "previous".