It is amusing to hear George Osborne sternly warning the Chancellor not to use next week's Budget for a pre-election bribe to voters when the country can't afford it, because that is exactly what the Tories did in 1992.
The Institute of Fiscal Studies — the think tank with a mission to bring honesty into the discussion of public finances — has just published a timely reminder of what happened that year and subsequently.
The election — which John Major was expected to lose just as Gordon Brown is now — was timed for April. In the budget just a few weeks before polling day, his then-chancellor Norman Lamont announced tax cuts worth £5.5 billion in today's money.
And against all expectations, Major secured a narrow victory over the Labour party led by Neil Kinnock, though whether that was down to Lamont's giveaway Budget or Labour's scaring the electorate by being excessively honest about the need for tax rises is something we may never know.
However a rather embarrassed Lord Lamont later admitted that this was not one of his better budgets.
The next year, with the economy still in recession and the public finances in a mess which, at the time, seemed as big as anything we confront today, Lamont produced a budget which encompassed tax rises of £23 billion — again in today's money.
Later, in November of that same year after Ken Clarke had replaced Lamont as Chancellor, there was a second budget. This brought in a further £16 billion of tax raising measures. So the £5 billion pre-election tax cut was followed by £39 billion of tax increases.
Who says history does not repeat itself?
