This election already has one clear winner: the Institute for Fiscal Studies. There was a day last week when every second sentence on the Today programme seemed to begin "the Institute for Fiscal Studies says". None of the politicians interviewed dared to challenge frontally the IFS figures on public spending cuts. The same happened on Question Time with David Dimbleby.
Yet what those figures revealed was devastating. They showed that none of the parties has even begun to level with us about the scale of the public spending cuts that await us. What they have so far identified is less than a third of what will be needed to reduce the structural deficit: the Lib Dems being clearest and most upfront, but still a long way off.
