Peter Hoskin

A lot of pixels have been expended on Labour's new class war and soak-the-rich strategies, so it's worth highlighting the in-a-nutshell argument which Tom Harris deploys against them on his blog: "Rather than using opinion polls as a basis on which to judge the wisdom of class politics, let’s take a rather different measure: general election results. In 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992, Labour promised tax increases (but only for the wealthy) and got hammered. In 1997, 2001 and 2005, we pledged not to increase the basic or higher rates of tax. And golly! Look what happened!" Ok, correlation and cause aren't necessarily the same thing.

If PMQs today showed anything, it's just how eager the Tories' opponents are to bring up the issue of Lord Ashcroft.  Vince Cable set the ball rolling by referring to the Tory deputy chairman as a "non dom", and Harriet Harman gleefully followed up by firing questions in William Hague's direction.  She was cut off – and rightly so – by John Bercow.  But the insinuations about the Lord and his tax status had already been made. Now, you could say that this is pretty low stuff from Labour and the Lib Dems.  After all, David Cameron pledged earlier this week to legislate so that all MPs and peers are UK taxpayers.

Of all the findings from today's ICM poll for the Guardian, I imagine this one will concern the Tory leadership most: "Just two months ago, 49 percent of voters said they thought Cameron and Osborne would do better than Darling and Brown, but that figure is 38 percent today." They're still ahead of Brown and Darling – who are langushing on 31 percent – but the drop is still pretty striking.  What's more, it seems to go against conventional wisdom about fixing the fiscal mess we're in.  While they could still go further in setting out a few specifics, the fact is that the Tory pair have spent the last couple of months railing against the the twin debt and deficit burdens, and stressing the need for spending cuts.

An argument put forward by some Labour types is that we're not really facing a debt crisis at all.  "Yes, the national debt levels are bad," they say, "but we started off at a low level in comparison to other countries, so we can absorb the deficits we're racking up." Well, you can take issue with the idea that we had "low levels" of debt before the crisis kicked in – but the real mistake this statement makes is to ignore the rate at which we've accumulated debt.  As the latest OECD data shows, UK debt is set to rise faster than any other nation save for Iceland and Ireland: The picture would probably look even worse if you accounted for all the off-balance sheet fiddles, like the toxic bank assets and PFI.

Considering the fiscal crisis we face, this revelation in Andrew Rawnsley's column is particularly dispiriting: "[Gordon Brown] has been egged on by Ed Balls [to make more spending promises], partly because the schools secretary is also obsessed with that old dividing line, partly because he wanted to be able to boast that he had won more money for his department. I am reliably told that the wrangling between the schools secretary and the chancellor went on into the early hours of the morning on the day of the PBR itself. The result was that some of the extra spending beaten out of Mr Darling by Mr Balls did not get into the document because it was already printed.

Is it just me, or have the Tories developed a slightly harder edge in the couple of days since the Pre-Budget Report?  We had an unusually acidic address from David Cameron yesterday, in which he likened Brown 'n' Darling to "joy-riders in a car smashing up the neighbourhood," and criticised the PBR for its "irresponsibility, basic deceit and complete lack of moral principle".  There have been a couple of quite powerful attack posters from CCHQ.  And now we've got George Osborne saying that Brown may have "betrayed the responsibilities of the office he holds." "So what?" you say, "they're the Opposition – it's their job to oppose."  Well, yes, of course.  But that opposition seems to have been concentrated over the past few days.