Today’s news is the extremely welcome announcement by David Cameron of a new Tory economic strategy – of slowing the growth of government, dropping the commitment to Labour’s spending plans and promising tax cuts funded by government efficiency. You can read his excellent speech on the matter on the Conservatives website and his even better op-ed in The Guardian.

That’s all very good, but what I’ve found really interesting is what Labour are up to today. It’s summed up very nicely in this sentence from the Evening Standard:

The Chancellor signalled that he would find bigger than expected efficiency savings in IT costs, procurement deals and sales of its assets and property.

Savings, you say? Savings?

That’s cuts, you’ve got there, mate. Savings isn’t the word you’re looking for, you’re looking for the word cuts. Tory cuts. And we all know, after 10 years of being told so, you can’t make savings on Government efficiency, you can only make damaging cuts that hurt people and cause the sky to fall down.

I’m sure the Tories sums don’t add up though. Never mind whether the Goverment needs to borrow £15bn (and hide mountains of debt off the balance sheet) to make its sums add up. What’s really important is that the Tories sums don’t add up.

Ahem.