No - nor have the Tories

and actually I don't think we should require more than indicative views on that from them.

There is actually an ideological split on this, and it's reasonable for us to vote on whether we favour harder cuts or more borrowing without being precise on the detail.

Many people won't grasp the detail anyway, but even those who do usually don't grasp that it's literally impossible to plan out much more than a year ahead because you have no idea what's going to happen.

Any business will tell you that yes, they have a three-year strategy (because you have to have a direction or you go nowhere); but while Year One numbers have a chance of being hit, Years Two and Three are frankly guesses and a work of fiction. Some very very large companies work on this basis, quite successfully, and I don't see why we should demand more of our politicians, few of whom actually understand economics (they don't need to, they have people to understand it for them), and none of whom can predict the fundamentally unpredictable.

Posted By: Old Man, Apr 2, 23:06:07