Jonathan Jones

'We have reduced the deficit by a quarter in just two years' — the coalition's mid-term review. True. But when Gordon Brown proposed to do precisely the same in Labour's last budget, George Osborne criticised him for not moving fast enough and endangering the economy. The ONS shows that public sector net borrowing was down 24 per cent from 2009-10 to 2011-12. But George Osborne cannot claim to have stuck to his deficit reduction plan. That has been torn up. The below graph shows Brown's plan (in the middle), Osborne's original plan (at the bottom) and his current plan (at the top): As you can see, Osborne is now cutting the deficit more slowly than Alistair Darling proposed in 2010. Darling planned to cut the deficit by 33.9 per cent by this year, compared to the 24.

Who's on the side of the strivers? Is it George Osborne, who's cutting benefits in real terms for the next three years, which he defends as 'being fair to the person who leaves home every morning to go out to work and sees their neighbour still asleep, living a life on benefits'? Or is it Ed Balls, who's opposing the move as Osborne 'making striving working families pay the price for his economic failure'? Both men are convinced that their stance will help win the votes of low- and middle-income workers. At least one of them is wrong. Isabel has explained the sources of Labour's confidence. One is a YouGov poll released on Sunday, showing 42 per cent of 'C2DEs' (working class and lower) think benefits should rise at least in line with inflation.

In the end, the threat from smaller parties came to nothing, and Labour easily retained all of the three safe seats it was defending yesterday. In fact, they extended their vote share in all three as well. Respect could only manage a distant fourth in Rotherham and sixth in Croydon North, where former Ken Livingstone adviser Lee Jasper lost his deposit. Instead it was Ukip who came second in Rotherham and Middlesbrough, and third in Croydon North. Both coalition parties saw their vote collapse in all three seats. The Conservatives ended up fourth in Middlesbrough and fifth in Rotherham (their worst results of this parliament), though they did manage to hold onto second in Croydon North. The Liberal Democrats fell to third in Middlesbrough, fourth in Corydon North and eighth in Rotherham.

Tomorrow's three by-elections — the 11th, 12th and 13th since the general election — should have been three easy Labour victories. They are defending majorities of 16,481 in Croydon North, 10,462 in Rotherham and 8,689 in Middlesbrough. And certainly neither the Conservatives nor the Liberal Democrats — second and third in all three seats in 2010 — look capable of overturning them. But Labour are not looking as comfortable as they'd hoped. In both Croydon North and Rotherham, they've come under threat from Respect, raising the possibility that we'll see a repeat of the 'Bradford Spring' that saw George Galloway return to the Commons with 56 per cent of the vote in Bradford West in March.

Messrs Miliband and Balls performed their pre-autumn statement double act today. If for some inexplicable reason you missed it, the Labour chiefs launched their Q&A with an attack on the government for its decision to cut 50p income tax rate to 45p: 'The Government is about to give an average of £107,500 each to 8,000 people earning over a million a year. Not £40,000, but £107,500. To 8,000 millionaires. David Cameron and George Osborne are giving them this money. But it’s coming from you. 'You are paying the price of their failure and them standing up for the wrong people. David Cameron and George Osborne believe the only way to persuade millionaires to make work harder is to give them more money.

In the run-up to the Budget in March, Danny Alexander was pushing for the abolition of higher-rate relief on pension contributions, which would save the government £7 billion plus a year. George Osborne didn't include it in his Budget, but today the Liberal Democrat gets support from a perhaps unlikely quarter: the Centre for Policy Studies. Echoing the Chief Secretary to the Treasury's analysis, Michael Johnson's CPS report says: 'Today's tax-based incentives to save for retirement are hugely expensive and, worse, ineffectively deployed. Skewed towards the wealthy, they do far less than they should to minimise pensioner poverty. Furthermore, they do little to catalyse a savings culture amongst younger workers, thereby exacerbating the looming generational inequality.

When George Osborne gives his Autumn Statement on 5 December, the OBR will publish its new forecasts for growth, deficit and debt. For the last few weeks, the consensus has been that the OBR would declare that Osborne will miss the debt target he set himself in 2010: to have the debt-to-GDP ratio falling in 2015-16. The logic behind this, as I set out in September, is pretty straightforward: the OBR will have to lower its growth forecasts, which will in turn mean lower tax revenues, higher deficits and more debt. But it now looks like Osborne might narrowly avoid failure, though not because the outlook for the economy or the government finances is any brighter.

As Fraser reported at the time, Labour put up a deficit clock on its website last month, claiming that the government was borrowing £277 million more during Tory conference than in the same four days last year. It based this on the borrowing figures available at the time, which were for the period April to August. In that period, the government had borrowed £802 a second more than in the same five months of 2011, so Labour assumed it would continue to do so in October. But new figures out yesterday show that this was not the case. In fact, looking just at borrowing in October, Labour was lowballing it by about £67 million. The ONS says the government borrowed £8.6 billion in October 2012, £2.7 billion more than the £5.

Even so soon after President Obama's reelection, speculation over who might replace him in January 2017 is already in full swing. Here are the early favourites, as judged by Ladbrokes: Republicans: Paul Ryan: Nominee 5/1, President 12/1 The Congressman from Wisconsin has gained national prominence as chair of the House Budget Committee and more recently as Mitt Romney's running mate, setting him up as the early favourite to be the GOP's next nominee. But if he were to be successful in the primaries, it'd be only the second time ever a losing Vice Presidential candidate had won the nomination four years later. Of the 16 losing VP nominees since the Second World War, eight ran for their party's nomination in the next election, and only one — Walter Mondale — secured it.