Grim tidings
To the Methodist Central Hall, Westminster, for a conference organised by , previewing the coming year in Parliament. The highlight, if that's quite the right word, was a quite terrifying presentation by Robert Ward, the director of global forecasting, of the Economist Intelligence Unit - the highly respected analytical arm of the news magazine.
His message was that the next government will have to find a combination of tax rises and spending cuts of about £100bn. That figure doesn't just dwarf - it utterly eclipses all of the cuts and economies proposed by our main parties thus far, or indeed likely to be proposed in this week's Pre-Budget Report....
To close the yawning black hole in the nation's finances, Mr Ward believes we'll need a VAT rise to, say 20%, and a flotilla of other tax rises, plus deep spending cuts, plus perhaps a public sector pay freeze, plus extensive job losses, with benefit cuts or freezes for dessert, maybe. The world financial markets will demand a credible strategy for long-term recovery, or they'll simply stop lending to Britain.
And at the same time, the next government will also have to be very smart about the nature and timing of its cuts, so as not to smother any nascent economic recovery before it starts. In particular, that means not taking the easy option of scrapping public investments necessary to the economic recovery - new roads or power stations, perhaps.
The politics look horrible for any incoming government, and especially horrible if the voters return a hung parliament, maybe even one requiring not two parties to form a governing majority (the usual scenario of one of the two big parties, plus the Lib Dems) but three. Imagine a coalition, or governing arrangement requiring the extra votes of, say, the Scottish Nationalists or the Democratic Unionists on top of some Lib-Lab or Lib-Con pact. Mr Ward thinks the international financial markets could take fright. They want transparency; and an inter-party deal would not be as straightforward as one-party rule. "It would not be optimal, shall we say," he said, delicately. So any hung parliament deal would have to demonstrate its robustness pretty rapidly.
That first post election Budget could be a pretty grim affair, whoever's elected.
I'm Mark D'Arcy and I'll be writing about what goes on in the chambers and committee rooms at Westminster.
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