Credit where credit is due. The taxation and spending plans which Oliver Letwin, the Tory shadow chancellor, revealed this week are the most rigorous that an opposition party has ever produced. They are also almost painfully responsible in their insistence on allocating more money to reducing future borrowing than to relieving hard-pressed taxpayers. And there is good reason to suppose that if they were implemented, the medium-term prospects for the economy would be slightly better than if the government sticks to its current course. Unfortunately, none of this is likely to make a blind bit of difference to the outcome of the general election expected in May. Mr Letwin and a large team of bean-counters working under David James, a flamboyant City troubleshooter, have laboured for over a year, poring over every aspect of government line by line. The result-£35 billion ($66 billion) worth of savings extracted from a mixture of efficiency and cutting down government activity—is that the Tories now believe they can credibly promise to redirect £23 billion into "priority areas", while lowering government borrowing by £8 billion and cutting taxes by £4 billion in their first post-election budget.
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