The prime minister and chancellor have just four days to put together a set of tax rises and public spending cuts that will make the Offie for Budget Responsibility’s numbers add up. That is because the OBR needs two weeks to put the numbers through its computers before the Medium-Term Fiscal Plan on Halloween.
On that day, Kwarteng has to announce that he and the OBR agree that the measures he is presenting will stop the national debt rising within five years. If he fails to do that, the markets will panic. It is compulsory to describe the markets as jittery at the moment, but panic is different; neither he nor Truss would survive the meltdown.
So the numbers have to add up, and we have a good idea of the scale of the sums from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which has done a fine job of putting itself in the OBR’s place. The government has to raise taxes and cut spending by a total of about £60bn a year to stabilise the debt.
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