Eddie Barnes: Darling's approach still keeps his predecessor's formula

IT WAS Gordon Brown who wrote the rule book on the politics of the dividing line.

By selecting his battleground of choice and laying out the arguments he wished to deploy ("my investments versus your cuts"), he has long been able to bludgeon opponents into submission.

Alistair Darling yesterday unveiled his own version of the Brown formula. As befits Mr Darling's more measured approach, the style was a little less brutal but the tactics were familiar for all that.

On one side, declared Mr Darling, was Labour: solid, dependable and balanced. Yes, the deficit needs dealing with, he agreed. But not at the expense of pulling support for businesses and the less well-off.

And on the other were the Tories: wedded to free market ideology, and determined to pull the rug from under the recovery.

Leave aside for a moment the fact that the actual announcements yesterday showed up the similarities between the two parties (the Conservatives, for example, already support increasing tax relief for first-time buyers), Mr Darling's 57 minutes at the dispatch box was, from first to last, about laying out The Great Choice before a sullen electorate.

Think we're bad? Mr Darling asked them. Look at the other lot. Consequently, his performance was quickly being received by commentators and business groups as a very "political Budget".

That definition is odd, however, because one thing Mr Darling conspicuously did not do yesterday was splash any cash – which is what pre-election chancellors are supposed to do.

In 1992, chancellor Norman Lamont – despite being faced with his own recession – still went ahead with 5.5 billion in tax cuts.

While a Labour chancellor might not be expected to cut tax, he might at least be expected to dole out some more funding to his client vote. Mr Darling declined. It was notable that – for the first Budget since 1997 – there was no extra money for either schools or the NHS. What has changed is the political context.

Three years into the great global economy wobble, voters are simply that much more aware of the knife-edge on which countries such as the UK are balanced. Consequently, both Mr Darling and Lord Mandelson had already realised that a pre-election giveaway Budget would have been suicidally counter-productive with a public which, instinctively, knows that the good times have ended.

And so, despite this year's deficit having been downgraded from the apocalyptic 178bn to the merely gob-smacking sum of 167bn, the Chancellor limited himself to spending the relatively minuscule sums mainly on help for the elderly and on the deferred fuel duty increase.

The spending was so tiny it was already leading to speculation yesterday it may have been specifically cut to allow Gordon Brown to hurl around a few extra spending promises in April, as he takes to the election trail.

He will be unwise to do so, because Labour's dividing lines have now been dug in, with Mr Darling having made a virtue of the government's necessity.

For the Conservatives, the challenge now must be to remind voters relentlessly about how Labour was to blame for this mess – and to offer some respite themselves.

George Osborne is said to be working feverishly to cost a plan enabling him to scrap Labour's 1p increase in National Insurance, due to come in this time next year. That would be the kind of game changer that might seize back the initiative.