He'll save with a mighty hand. Photograph: PA
(Is it just us, or is Gordon starting to morph into Norman Lamont in that picture?)
The Observer political team has of course raced out to get the drinks in before the 18:00 tax-hike deadline. Our diligent daily cousins over the road, meanwhile, are doing a sterling job of bringing you the budget latest, and we wouldn't want to steal their thunder.
But we can report a most edifying discussion from our weekly politics conference earlier today. Conversation skimmed like a flat stone on a glassy pond over the Budget, landing instead on the sandy bank of wider economic speculation. The conversation - somewhat distorted by the cracked lens of the blog - went something like this:
- A million manufacturing jobs lost since 1997, that's got to be bad, right?
- Well, the thing is, Britain just can't hope to compete with China and India in that sector. The idea is that the low paid, and basically rubbish jobs are replaced with better, more lucrative service jobs.
- Doesn't that raise a question about whether or not it is a sustainable economic model for us to all sell coffee to each other and do each other's hair for a living while all the real work is outsourced to cheap labour economies.
- We do have quite a vicious trade deficit.
Cue nostalgia theme: Dvorak's Symphony no.9, a.k.a From the New World, a.k.a the Hovis ad.
- Ah, do you remember when the balance of trade really mattered, when a deficit could lose a party an election?
- And what about the exchange rate, that used to count for something too, back in the day....
Sound of needle being pulled across vinyl. Music abruptly stops.
- Er.. Selling each other coffee and doing each other's hair? That's a bit of a misrepresentation of the services economy. Financial services? IT? That's stuff that we sell abroad, y'know.
- More coffee, anyone?
The blog pet number-crunching monkey thrusts a scrap of paper through the bars of its cage.
Manufacturing output rose by 0.7 per cent in the three months to january, according to the Office for National Statistics. Meanwhile, the trade deficit in January was 3.7bn pounds up 0.2bn from December.
We notice that Gordon, in his speech to the House, gave a little nod to competition from the developing world ("on course to deliver half of the world's manufacturing exports") and to his recent trip to China, before announcing plans to boost "science and the knowledge economy".
Where's Will Hutton for some expert anlysis when you need him? Oh, in China, you say? Excellent. We look forward to reading something about that on Sunday.
