George Osborne is on course to miss Alistair Darling's deficit reduction plan, which was set down in law by the last government, and panned by the Tories at the time for failing to tackle the problem with sufficient rigour. But the chancellor will avoid any official censure after repealing an act of parliament, introduced by Darling in 2010, which called for the overall deficit to be halved in this parliament. Osborne said at the time that the Labour target did not go far enough and set out plans in his emergency budget in June 2010 to eliminate the structural budget deficit by March 2016. This is the part of the ... (full story)