As many of you will know, the Government has already taken prompt and painful steps to readjust its spending and tax profile, most conspicuously by effectively cutting public sector pay rates.
It remains on target for the underlying budgetary aggregates (that is, abstracting from once-off payments to the banking sector) and, if economic growth is consistent with its projections, the announced profile will get the deficit back to 3 per cent of GDP by 2014 as promised to our European partners.