The race for cuts  The following correction was printed in the
Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Monday January
31 2005  In Book III of his travels, Gulliver visits the Grand
Alchemy of the city of Lagoda in Balnibarbi and there witnesses
an experiment to extract sunshine from cucumbers. He had been
lowered there from the flying island of Laputa. In the leader
below, we said in error that it was the Laputans who had chased
this goal.  The Laputans tried to extract sunbeams from
cucumbers and Oliver Letwin wants to fund tax cuts from
government waste. Both schemes expect an unlikely formula to
work. When Gulliver arrived in Laputa its scientists had been
searching for eight years and got nowhere. The shadow chancellor
has only been looking for his savings for a year but despite his
efforts yesterday to add substance to his plans the Tory promise
of something for nothing is not much more convincing than the
Laputan search for unlimited sunlight. By offering to sustain
spending on most areas of g