Today's Update From The Waugh Zone Is Titled UNCHARTERED TERRITORY

* Paul Waugh

by Paul WAUGH | Politics Opinion

It will be late (after 7pm) and last only 90 minutes, but a debate and vote on a statutory instrument enacting George Osborne’s charter for budget responsibility will be the main political focus today.

Well before then, PMQs may well give David Cameron an irresistible opportunity to highlight John McDonnell’s U-turn. Cameron will want to exploit Labour confusion, but rather than going on the offensive he is being advised to take a gentler tone that reflects his own conference speech last week: lovebombing, not ridiculing, moderate Labour MPs and voters is the objective. (Though that doesn’t meant a Tory MP won’t ask about LabourUncut’s A-Z of Corbsplaining)

As for Jeremy Corbyn, it’s only his second outing in the PMQs bearpit and I understand he will mix it up with a combination of crowd sourced questions and his own, as well as some follow ups.

George Osborne put out some overnight quotes to seize on Labour’s discomfort, calling on “all moderate, progressive Labour MPs to defy their leadership and join with us to vote for economic sanity..failing that, they should at least follow the advice of the former shadow chancellor and abstain."

That reference to Chris Leslie is significant because he’s one of the few MPs to say he’d rather abstain tonight. Estimates vary of how many will follow suit (I think ‘dozens’ may be way over the mark, as a cabal of MPs has still to decide). The vote will be whipped and some moderates tell me it’s not worth copying Corbyn’s serial rebellions, especially as many like Rachel Reeves and Emma Reynolds now think opposing the charter sends a clearer message about Labour’s refusal to engage in Osborne’s ‘gimmick’.

Osborne may see his tactics as having been finally vindicated the collective Opposition stance: his whole emphasis in the coming Parliament is to paint the Labour party, not just Corbyn-McDonnell, as leftwing and divorced from swing voters’ concerns about sound finances. There’s simmering trouble over McDonnell’s failure to consult more widely, and bafflement as to his Guardian interview, but many Labour MPs are happy not to engage in the Chancellor’s ‘trap’.

As for Ed Balls, I’m told he certainly has had no discussions with Team Corbyn about the charter. Perhaps the key question for moderates now is ‘How Will Mike Gapes Vote?’. Gapes became a standard bearer of the anti-Corbynistas yesterday. 

McDonnell has done a Mirror piece explaining that it was tears of families of sacked Redcar steelworkers that clinched it for him, and the need to be flexible to borrow to invest in skills and support for manufacturing. (There’s a bigger issue here about why Redcar went under, and no-nonsense Anna Soubry yesterday pointed out the global price of steel was the main factor, but that’s for another day).

The real problem for some Labour frontbenchers is a lack of clarity about Labour’s alternative. McDonnell told the PLP he would set out his own principles of fiscal responsibility to deny the ‘deficit denier’ charge. But today it looks like we will just get a vaguer consultative document instead.

In the Times, one shadow front bencher says the risk is to repeat Ed Miliband’s mistakes on the economy, but even earlier. “They’ve not made any effort to make the case [for their economic plans]. It was the same with Ed [Miliband].”

Danny Blanchflower, an economic advisor to Mr McDonnell, was on the Today programme attacking the idea of ‘tying yourself to a silly rule’, especially its definition of forcing a budget surplus in ‘normal times’. ‘That would be fine’ he said of the overall principle, but pointed out that with interest rates still close to zero “we are nowhere near normality”. Asked why McDonnell had told the Guardian he would sign up to the Osborne charter, Blanchflower replied: “I don’t know the answer to that”. He admitted he had been ‘surprised’.

* Paul Waugh is the Executive Editor, Politics, HuffPost UK.