It is a mystery as to why Messrs Miliband and Balls gave such a lacklustre response to last week's Budget.

It was an open goal but they appear to have been thrown off-course by the pension changes while missing the underlying story below, which is that after four years of austerity we are still nowhere near seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
 
‘Further difficult decisions are required,' says the Budget report. Total managed expenditure (TME), which was £695bn in 2011/12, is £715.5bn this year and £732bn the next.

In 2015/16, forecast to be a difficult year for local government, TME will be £743.6bn. The average real drop in TME between 2010/11 and 2015/16 will be just 0.7%.

Meanwhile more middle income earners are being dragged into the 40% tax bracket along with homebuyers paying stamp duty.

I attended a briefing the next day where ex-chancellor Lord Lamont neatly summed up George Osborne's Budget as ‘the job is only halfway done, austerity continues' with a few ‘bread and circuses' thrown in such as low taxes on beer and bingo.

Lord Lamont then proceeded to vent his spleen about the tax burden, saying that when the 40% rate was introduced in 1988 just one in 20 people paid it, whereas now one in six pay it. This means, especially in London, that public sector staff like police, social
workers and teachers are now in the 40% tax bracket.

Add in national insurance plus, for former students, the repayment of student loans (which at £40,000 is £142 a month) and you can see that middle Britain is under the cosh.

From 2016 public sector employees and employers will also pay higher national insurance contributions as the ‘contracting out' benefit ceases with the new single-tier state pension scheme.

Local authorities already face a very difficult year in 2015/16.  If health and education continue to be ring-fenced then deficit reduction will continue to fall disproportionately on the rest of the public sector.

Extra employer national insurance payments are not factored into grant funding for local government. So the two Eds should have had plenty to complain about in their
Budget response but did not.

One suspects this is because they are undecided just where they sit on the public finances; is tax too high for the squeezed middle in which case public spending needs to come down further?

Or is spending too low in which case tax must go up? They have a year in which to make up their minds.