I am on John Pienaar's podcast this week

I was invited to be the guest on John Pienaar's weekly political review podcast this week. We discussed the pre-Budget report and the continuing saga of MPs' expenses.

You can download the podcast from here. You can also subscribe to it on iTunes via this link here.

Darling should have called Brown's bluff

So it turns out that Alistair Darling and the Treasury wanted to go much further in terms of steps to control the deficit in Wednesday's pre-Budget report but Gordon Brown (with more than a little help from Ed Balls) overruled him.

Now of course we don't know the full story here. It could be that Brown had actually wanted an even more profligate PBR and that Darling managed to win a few skirmishes to get us to where we are but frankly he could have and should have done much better.

Let's just have a quick look at the political realities of Darling's situation. Everyone knows that Brown wanted to move him from the Treasury and replace him with Balls in the reshuffle earlier this year but was too politically weak when Darling dug his heels in and threatened to leave the cabinet altogether. That showed how powerful his position was. If anything, his position now is even stronger. We are only a few months from an election and a principled resignation on economic policy at this stage would be devastating for Brown. Darling could and should have insisted on pushing his tighter PBR through. What was Brown going to do? Fire him?

Alistair Darling had nothing to lose. After the next election, one of two things will happen. Either Labour will be out of power and hence Darling will no longer be Chancellor of the Exchequer (most likely). The second possibility is that by some dramatic turnaround, Brown actually manages to remain Prime Minister (pretty unlikely, but possible). If that happens then with a fresh mandate, you can bet that item number one on his agenda will be to get Balls into No 11. Therefore Darling has at best another few months as Chancellor.

He should have called Brown's bluff on the PBR. I suspect Brown would have folded faster than Superman on laundry day. Had he done this, Darling would have been doing the country (and incidentally his place in history) a big favour.

Instead he is now as guilty as Brown for not taking the necessary action when he had the chance.

PBR shows Labour think they will soon be out of power

I have been in a meeting for most of the day and so am only just catching up with the PBR now. However my first impression rattling through the headlines on the BBC News website and reading initial reaction from blogs and commentators is that there is a lot less here than I was expecting.

All the measures announced will make a smallish difference in each case and they do not seem to add up to anything substantial. It certainly does not feel like a government getting a firm grip on public spending and revenue raising/budget reduction to try and get us out of the worst financial crisis in working people's living memory.

What it actually seems like to me is doing the bare minimum in order to try and shore up their political position and leave whoever is in government after the next election to pick up the pieces.

If I appear to be unfair here, ask yourself this. Given the state of the finances, would this PBR have been the same if the government still had say 3 or 4 years to run? I suspect not and that they would have been trying much harder to get a grip now. Therefore I think it is only fair to conclude that they do not expect it to be them doing that picking up after June 2010.