Fraser Nelson

It has started. The Labour attack unit is out today talking about a "Tory VAT rise" - as per Paddy Hennessy’s scoop. Osborne stated his (to me, relatively paltry) position on the deficit: that he’d reduce it faster than Labour but can’t say how much. The Labour attack unit keeps partying like its 1999 with the "Tory cuts" line, now augmented with a "Tory tax rise." Here are the words which the attack unit has crafted for Stephen Timms, chief secretary to the Treasury: "George Osborne refuses to say what services he would cut or what taxes he would increase in order to cut the deficit 'further and faster' than Labour.

It has taken eight years, but Tony Blair has finally leveled with the British public and admitted that the WMD thing didn’t really matter: he wanted to depose Saddam Hussein anyway. That's what he has said in a BBC interview, presumably to pre-empt his appearance before the Chilcot inquiry. His chosen confessor: Fern Britton. His medium: BBC1 on Sunday. It has been trailed to the newspapers, including tomorrow’s Times. As it says: "He said it was the 'threat' that Saddam presented to the region that was uppermost in his mind. The development of weapons of mass destruction was one aspect of that threat. Mr Blair said that there had been 12 years of the United Nations going 'to and fro' on the subject, and he noted that Saddam had used chemical weapons on his own people.

I will sign off tonight with this sickening graph from the earlier IFS presentation – showing the extent to which Gordon Brown’s economic incompetence has transformed the public finances for a generation. Servicing this debt will absorb money that would otherwise be spent creating jobs, lifting people out of poverty, advancing education, promoting prosperity. The leading article in the magazine this week finishes with these words, which came to mind when I saw the above graph: “It will be no surprise if UK public debt has been downgraded by the election; if so, a gilt buyers’ strike will become more than a theoretical possibility. The new government will face a Sisyphian financial task, so formidable as to make almost every other issue of the day look trivial.

So Alistair Darling today repeated the same trick he used in April’s Budget – referring only to rising “current spending”, so as to hide the full extent of Labour’s spending cuts. Current spending is only one component of total spending, and when you add in some of the other components – as we have done in the table below – the cuts become clearer. The table shows that next year is the last year of any real rise in spending. From 2011, spending either falls or flattens out. But the cuts will be even deeper than the table reveals.  This “total spending” figure is all we could work out from the appendices in today’s Pre-Budget Report – but, alas, it doesn’t account for debt repayments or unemployment benefits.

Things are shaping up nicely for Gordon Brown ahead of the Pre-Budget Report next week. The Tories were 17 points ahead on ICM in October – now it’s 11. Cameron would have a narrow majority on this basis but, given the margin of error, we’re back into hung parliament territory. And this has a self-reinforcing effect on the Tories. A shrinking opinion poll means they tend to get paralysed, avoid arguments, play it safe, wait for Labour to screw up again. As I say in my News of the World column today, the voters who are looking for leadership then don’t really see it. This, of course, softens the Tory vote further. So the stage is set for Labour to get away with murder next week.

Anyone interested in climate change should buy The Spectator today. We don’t normally make such naked plugs here on Coffee House, but our global warming special has a line-up of the variety and quality which I guarantee you will find in no other British magazine or newspaper. As the FT's Samuel Brittan says: we dare to debate. You’ve seen the piece about why the Maldives aren’t sinking, from a world-leading sea levels expert who has made six field trips to the islands. We also have the Freakonomics guys showing how geo-engineering has such potential, even though the environmentalists don’t seem interested. We unearth a never-seen-before CIA file from 1974 which shows how all the scientists were convinced about global ...

Whenever a London bookmaker made odds on Scottish politics, my former colleagues at The Scotsman used to make easy money*. The world of Holyrood, where yours truly served a one year tour of duty, has its own political weather system that it’s hard to understand from a distance – so likelihoods are given very high odds. But today Ladbrokes gives odds that I think are pretty fair: 20-1 on independence before 2015. The SNP’s rout in Glasgow North West a fortnight ago is part of a wider reluctance to separate from England. The financial crisis, and the way that RBS somehow became the new Darien Scheme, has spooked everyone.

Is the British economy turning Japanese? Since asking the question last year on Coffee House, the evidence has been piling up – and it makes for a cover story in this week's magazine (which I have written with Mark Bathgate). The similarities are as follows: 1. Japan’s bust followed years of debt-fuelled growth which vain politicians saw as prosperity. 2. When the bust came, Japan’s government kept on spending. They did so in the name of Keynsian stimulus, thinking this would in itself kick start a recovery. All it achieved was to sink Japan deeper into debt. 3. Crucially, Japan didn’t do full disclosure on the collapsed banks. To fix the banks was, they figured, painful root canal surgery that this recession-struck country could do without. 4.