Alistair Darling telling us that this won’t be a giveaway Budget is the equivalent of Churchill warning us in 1940 that there’d be no skiing holidays in the Bavarian Alps that year. So completely removed is the Chancellor’s ‘pledge’ from what needs to be done, to the objective observer it sounds daft to the point of being almost surreal. But as ever, New Labour sets and than frames the territory for discussion, while the Opposition looks on, apparently struck dumb.

Darling (and his enemy Peter Mandelson, now hard at work suggesting that the Budget is actually ahead of schedule on debt repayment) are engaged in distraction from the biggest of many flaws in the Government’s fiscal strategy: the optimistic nature of the Chancellor’s growth forecasts. For 2010 and 2011, they are respectively 20% and 45% above those of any other source. This alone caused the UK’s leading forecasting consortium ITEM to observe yesterday that ‘a more aggressive, detailed and credible plan’ is needed to replace the one being peddled by New Labour.

In its enthusiasm for any straw available, the Government is now shaping up to suggest that its £7 billion ‘undershoot’ means deficit reduction can start early…all 1% of it. But the rest of it can’t, because otherwise the sky will fall in, says Chicken Licken. If this were a real and present danger, one would expect Darling to use the seven billion for further stimulation and/or investment in lending to new manufacturing sectors. The whole construct is laughable.

I’ve no more intention of voting Conservative than I do of voting for half a decade or more of Brown, so it sticks in my craw to write Osborne’s rebuttal speech for him. But were I the heir to the Osborne & Little fortune, these are the ten points I’d make tomorrow to wake up a House of Commons rendered comatose by an hour or more of Alistair:

1. The fiscal dilemma we face is not one of timing, but of depth.
2. If it was one of timing, the private sector would be showing real signs of responding to QE by now, but it isn’t.
3. This is because the UK’s private sector capable of outputting exports is minute compared to that of Germany, France, and most other developed countries. France hung on to its manufacturing because it never had Thatcher; Germany has a competitive manufacturing base because it never needed Thatcher.
4. Therefore whether we start to reduce the deficit now, or in January 2011, is absolutely irrelevant to economic performance.
5. This is because a baby as yet unborn cannot walk, even when given food – or get rickets when it isn’t.
6. It is, by contrast, centrally crucial to avoiding national insolvency accompanied by rampant hyperinflation: both of which will make it impossible for us to either borrow to stay afloat, or buy the materials we need to manufacture, respectively.
7. The name of the game is paying back as much as possible starting right now, in order to cheat the inevitably vicious quadrangle of rising interest rates, falling confidence in us, rising material costs and falling exports.
8. The argument that this could push us ‘back into’ recession is based on two fictions: (a) that we ever really emerged from recession, and (b) that severe pain can any longer be avoided. Of course this is going to be painful: we’ve been living a lie since 1979 -how could it be anything else?
9. There is no benefit at all in saving medium-term jobs if in the long-term there are none at all, and everyone’s savings become worthless.
10. If we show ghastly global capitalism that Britain will knuckle down to paying back debt and rejecting debt-economics, ghastly global capitalism will warm to us. If we don’t, it will leave us to rot.

If George Osborne fails to land these blows, he will merely be confirming the long-held view of British politicians: that the People themselves are too stupid to be trusted. Quite a few of them do indeed fit this description, but the Shadow Chancellor himself has already observed, “People are not daft”. I have a feeling that he will do the business.

DUE TO HOUSEHOLD DUTIES, POSTS WILL BE SPORADIC UNTIL THIS AFTERNOON. SO NOW IS A GOOD TIME TO DUMP THAT BAD NEWS,PETER.