UK Gordon Brown was on Wednesday accused by the Tories of covering up the state of the public finances, after leaked Treasury papers suggested that soaring debt interest and social security costs could force the biggest spending cuts since the 1970s.
The rising burden of what Mr Brown once called “the bill for social failure” prompted the Treasury to forecast in April that departmental budgets in the next spending round would have to be cut by 8.6 per cent in the three years to 2014, substantially higher than previous estimates.
