Sorry. This is a bit rushed. The interesting bits have been cut out and the parts with real popular appeal have been saved for another day. In the spirit of Alistair Darling’s autumn statement, this is a hurried, heavily edited text.

No doubt, the Pre-Budget Report would have been jammed with good lines – on income tax cuts, climate change levies and stamp duty - if there had been an election. But, it seems, no sooner had the Prime Minister opted out of an early poll than the Chancellor started hitting the delete button. As a result, the PBR turned into the Bermuda Triangle of political statements: new ideas had, rather mysteriously, gone missing.

To be sure, Mr Darling’s intended message was that Labour is the party of public services: while the Conservatives want to cut inheritance tax in such a way that it rewards the wealthy, the Labour Party will save that money and plough it into schools and hospitals.

But this was not the Labour fightback promised by the Prime Minister, as much as it was a rebuttal of the Tory agenda. The Chancellor co-opted Conservative ideas that he liked, such as the pledge to provide more housing for the Armed Forces and the idea of switching from an air passenger duty to a levy on planes.

And he set out to rubbish the tax proposals that seem to have so skewered the Brown Government. Mr Darling’s changes to inheritance tax were more thoughtful, if less aspirational, than Mr Osborne’s. Unfortunately, they will make little meaningful difference to the tax paid by British people, as evidenced by the fact that the Treasury has costed them at only £1 billion.

However, on the treatment of non-domiciles, Mr Darling’s statement was more than just slight. It was economical with the truth.

The Conservative proposal to impose what is in effect a £25,000 poll tax on wealthy foreigners living tax-free in the UK would not cover the costs of an inheritance tax cut, Mr Darling said, because “only an estimated 15,000 would earn sufficient money abroad to make it worthwhile to maintain non-domicile status”.

This may be true. Most probably it is not. The fact is that Mr Darling does not know. Nobody does. Maybe 15,000 of them could afford it on their UK taxable income, but their overseas riches are not revealed. The whole point of being non-dom is that you don’t have to declare your worldwide income. Mr Darling knows that and, frankly, he should know better. The place of non-doms in the UK is an issue that, if not dealt with responsibly, could cause great damage to the health of the economy and the fabric of society. In a speech that seemed to leave much on the cutting room floor, this was a piece of selective briefing too far.

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