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Administrative error means Chancellor will fulfil balanced budget pledge
Chancellor and Prime Minister-in-Waiting Gordon Brown announced today that in spite of the current economic slowdown and the consequent drop in tax revenues, his "golden rule" on balancing the budget will not be broken. The rule says that the current budget must be in balance over the economic cycle as a whole.
In comments to the Treasury Select Committee, the Chancellor said that owing to an administrative error the start of the current economic cycle had been inadvertently delayed from 1997 to 1999. Correcting this means that the large surpluses during that period will count in assessing whether or not the golden rule has been met.
In addition, he said, for consistency and year-by-year comparability, all annual figures will in future be normalised to the value of the pound in 1960. For example, an expenditure of £1000 in 2000 will actually be reported as £33 5s 6d.
"What this means," he said, "is that I can confidently predict that over the period in question we will in fact have seen an overall surplus of hundreds of billions of pounds."
Microphones then picked up a muttered comment, believed to be along the lines of "so stuff that in your underpants, Blair", but that could not be confirmed.
Treasury spokesman Douglas Ramsbottom explained that the administrative error was simply one of a junior level clerk typing a nine rather than a seven in a strategic planning document eighteen years ago. "No-one noticed the mistake at the time," he said, "but what it meant was we didn't start the current economic cycle until two years after we should have done. All we're doing now is retroactively correcting that. That's a standard accounting practice."
Other members of the Cabinet are fully seized with the concept. In particular, Home Secretary Charles Clarke is understood to have instructed officials to see if administrative errors can be used to justify reducing the number of criminal offences on the books by 50% in order to bring crime rates down.
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Wow, look at this!
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