Gordon must be pissing his pants with excitement, jumping up and down like a kid with a surprise bag of sweets wondering which one to gorge himself on first. I bet Alistair's ear is sore as hell already.
If you or I found that we hadn't quite maxed out our overdraft completely, we might reasonably expect to breathe a sigh of relief and be glad that we were a bit less shackled to the banks than we had thought.
Not Labour though. Oh no, they never saw a Pound they didn't want to spend. They forecast before they would overspend by £14billion in February, but they "only" borrowed £12.4billion! It's like they found £1.6billion in cash down the back of the sofa at 10 Downing Street! And just before a pre-election budget too.... well that's handy dandy, innit?
Philip Hammond, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury responded by saying the Government borrowed more than the entire Home Office budget in February and was "racking up debt at the astonishing rate of over £300,000 a minute."
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't mind having the opportunity to spend £300,000 of other people's money (yours) every minute. :-\ However, unlike Labour, I wouldn't do that -- I would just be enormously relieved that I hadn't put the whole country quite as far into hock as I had previously imagined.
If I was cynical, I might even think that they had deliberately overbudgetted certain items of expenditure, so that they had the credit approved beyond what was truly expected for the month. It would be pretty handy having this £1.6bn chunk of "spare change" on hand for electioneering purposes. But who could have known there would be an election just now in advance?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/7475279/Budget-2010-Alistair-Darling-receives-borrowing-boost.html
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