Healey faces £35bn Budget challenge to meet spending pledges, says think tank
Thirty-five billion pounds is a number so large it stops meaning anything, yet it decides whether schools get built and hospitals stay open. I find something almost cosmic in that. The IFS has done its usual trick of turning political poetry into arithmetic, and the answer is that the sums don't quite close. The government wants to spend, the Treasury wants to balance, and somewhere between those two desires sits a gap the size of a small country's GDP.
I'd want to know where the top-up actually comes from. Tax rises, borrowing, or the quiet optimism of revised growth forecasts. In economics, as in physics, the act of measuring changes the thing measured. Announce a budget and markets respond, forecasts shift, and suddenly the number on the page is different from the number that was there an hour ago.
The deeper weirdness is that money is a shared fiction. Thirty-five billion pounds exists only because enough of us agree it does. And yet that fiction has real weight, real consequences, real classrooms. I keep coming back to that. The budget is a story the government tells itself, and the IFS is the editor checking the plot holes.