There’s a section at the back of the Building Britain’s Future document where Labour spells out key “deliverables” for the next decade.

Some of these are indeed likely. Others less so. Alex and I have picked out some of the more controversial ones.

2013: Budget deficit halved since 2009/10.

8/10: Yes, this is the plan - the annual deficit should be back down in four years’ time. Although the national debt will keep on rising. The distinction between the two has been the subject of a ferocious row between Ed Balls and Fraser Nelson.

2014: £16bn of asset sales achieved

2/10: I revealed on Monday that this target is based entirely on a buoyant property market. Of the total, £11bn has to come from local authorities. But the LGA says council property sales have slumped from £4bn a year to £1bn a year. (Incidentally, if councils keep the receipts, how exactly does this plug the public finances - as No. 10 seem to suggest?)

2016: 240,000 new homes provided each year, improving affordability.

4/10 Given that only about 100,000 homes will be built this year, the forecast implies a dramatic recovery in the housing market. And the mortgage market. Clearly it is possible but this is crystal ball gazing. For now affordability will only be improved by house prices falling further. You’ll notice that the BBF document doesn’t refer to the ludicrous 3m homes by 2020 target.

2017: First Crossrail trains are expected to start running.

6/10 This afternoon I spoke to Stephen Glaister, the transport expert. He has serious concerns over whether the government will be able to afford the £5bn needed to make Crossrail work. He pointed to the line in the Budget saying government investment will drop in the next five years from 3.1 per cent of GDP to 1.3 per cent. “That is a terrifying figure,” he observers.

2017: 400,000 new green jobs

2/10 When it comes to green jobs Gordon Brown likes to pluck figures from thin air. I pointed out in January that he has so far predicted 100,000 new green jobs, 140,000 and 1million. I suppose 400,000 is neither less likely nor more likely than these other random numbers.

2020: Child poverty eradicated in the UK

3/10 Unlikely. The government was supposed to halve the figure by 2010 and has signally failed to do so. That doesn’t bode well for the bigger target.

2020: 90 per cent of children leave primary school having mastered the basics in English and Maths

?/10 I sincerely hope this one will happen. But it shows a desperate poverty of aspiration. A tenth of children aged 11 still illiterate and unable to add up - celebration time!

2020: 15 per cent of all our energy coming from renewable sources

4/10 Not exactly on track. Britain is still behind almost every other EU country in producing renewable energy. Here is a reminder of Shriti Vadera’s attempts to water down the target by asking if the UK could include, um, overseas projects funded with British cash.

2010: Up to 10 new ecotowns developed

1/10 Even the DCLG’s own internal report admits that only some of the remaining ecotown proposals will survive without public subsidy. For now, at least, the project appears doomed.

You would have thought that the prime minister would now have his public sector spending numbers at his fingertips - given that David Cameron has made the issue his focal point for three sessions of Prime Minister’s Questions in succession.

Apparently not. “Capital spending…will fall after 2011″ he said. Then, later: “Capital spending will rise to 2011 and then fall.”

This is less wrong than his previous PMQ claim that capital spending would keep rising until the Olympics (2012).

But it’s still wrong.

There was a clarification towards the end of the half-hour session when Brown said that in fact the figure would fall in 2010. His admission came after prompting by a Tory MP who reminded him that the Treasury’s own capital spending figures show £44bn this year and £36bn next year.

Some pundits are wondering whether Cameron should start following a different strategy and stop using up all his questions on the same theme. They ask whether the impact is blunted by repetition. I’m not sure. After all, Brown’s reputation was built on his solid grasp of numbers.

UPDATE

I forgot to mention Brown’s preposterous claim that the Tories were expecting unemployment to rise in the coming years - as if he was not.

Surely the Treasury’s own economic forecasts are based on unemployment rising substantially from today’s levels? Given that this is the consensus of almost all independent forecasters.

The charge against Gordon Brown is that his promise of future investment - instead of cuts - is cloud cuckoo land given the grim public finances. You may think this unfair.

But here is the verdict of the governor of the Bank of England today when asked about the national deficit:

Mervyn King:

“The speed of which the fiscal stimulus should be withdrawn has to depend on the state of the economy. …The scale of the deficit is truly extraordinary. 12.5 percent of GDP is not something that anybody would have anticipated even a year or two ago. And this reflects the scale of the global downturn.

But it also reflects the fact that we came into this crisis with fiscal policy itself on a path that wasn’t itself sustainable and a correction was needed.

There will certainly need to be a plan for the lifetime of the next parliament, contingent on the state of the economy, to show how those deficits will be brought down if the economy recovers to reach levels of deficits below those which were shown in the budget figures.”

Hazel Blears has become the second cabinet minister to resign in 24 hours. She is skipping PMQs and heading home to Salford this morning to spend more time with “her people” ahead of tomorrow’s local/European elections.

A friend says that the communities secretary felt “briefed against and picked on” by Gordon Brown’s allies. However, the person denied that Blears knew that she would be demoted in the imminent reshuffle: “We didn’t know what was going to happen.”

Blears’ allies deny that she had co-ordinated events with Bev Hughes, Jacqui Smith and Pat Hewitt, all of which said yesterday they were resigning. Others have their doubts.

Events are moving quickly and the pressure on the prime minister is growing by the hour. His ability to control events is diminished by the resignations.

Apparently Alistair Darling, David Miliband, James Purnell and Geoff Hoon are all reluctant to move post; would they outright refuse to move to new jobs?

Even the Guardian now thinks the prime minister should quit. Watch this space.

UPDATE

One former minister - and ally of Blears - says the Salford MP has been treated badly by the party. “There has been all kinds of mistakes made in the way No 10 have dealt with this ghastly crisis over expenses and the treatment of Hazel compared to other cabinet minister has left a sour taste in many people’s minds.”

FURTHER UPDATE

Rumours swirling around about Caroline Flint, Europe minister and Jane Kennedy, farming minister, following suit. I wouldn’t give these too much credence: at this point.

Labourlist repeats the Flint rumour. And it has the entire Blears statement for your perusal.

AND

If Brown is still standing next week - after what are expected to be grim results in Thursday’s elections - he faces what is effectively a motion of no confidence tabled by the Celtic nationalist parties.

The SNP and Plaid Cymru are holding an opposition day motion declaring: “This house requests the prime minister to seek the dissolution of the present Parliament.” How the Tories and Lib Dems act, and vote, will be fascinating.

Mike Weir, SNP member for Angus, is in line to ask a question at PMQs and will throw down this gauntlet towards the PM.

You can see how much of a squeeze the government is in by looking at the figures for its tax receipts.

Projections for 2009/10 are:

Income tax £140bn (against an estimate of £152bn in 08/09)

VAT £63.7bn (£78.4bn)

Capital gains tax £2.2bn (£7.8bn)

Stamp duties £5bn (£8bn)

Inheritance tax £2.3bn (£2.9bn)

Petroleum revenue tax £1.1bn (£2.6bn)

As a result, the total take by HMRC is expected to be £394bn this year, against an estimate of £427bn last year and £451bn the previous year. Ouch.

Total receipts, which include business rates, council tax and vehicle excise duties, will be about £496bn against £548bn in 2007-8.

If you want to take away two main points from today’s Budget they are these:

1] Borrowing is about to go through the roof. The figure for public sector net borrowing (PSNB) was just 2.4 per cent in 2007/8. It will have jumped to a punitive 12.4 per cent this year, before easing back to 11.9 per cent, 9.1 per cent, 7.2 per cent and (by 2013-14) 5. 5 per cent.

For this to take place, however, you have to believe some pretty optimistic forecasts from the chancellor.

2] Alistair Darling is predicting that consumer demand will return to pre-boom levels within a couple of years. And that GDP growth will be (after a 3.5 per cent fall this year) 1.25 per cent in 2010/11, compared to independent forecasts of 0.3 per cent. From then on the government expects annual growth of 3.5 per cent, a much more buoyant prediction than the Bank of England’s 2. 5 per cent.

The FT revealed on Tuesday that Darling would have to issue more than £200bn of government bonds this financial year, far above market expectations.

“With public borrowing set to soar to £170bn-£180bn, the chancellor will have to tap the market for an issuance of gilts that will be well over £50bn higher than the Debt Management Office estimated last month,” we wrote.

It turns out that the situation is even worse. A staggering £220bn of gilts will have to be issued in the current financial year, up from £146.4bn forecast in the November PBR (see Page 246 of the Budget red book.)

Some grim developments on the public finances front. Alistair Darling prepares to acknowledge the biggest forecasting error ever made by a British chancellor (he takes the crown from Denis Healey). The IFS calculates that we’ll have to find £39bn a year in extra taxes or spending cuts till 2016, just to plug the fiscal black hole. And, perhaps scariest of all, one of the most powerful UK hedge fund managers warns that the “only policy option left” for Darling is to print lots more money.

This is not a cheap audition to be the next George Soros. Mike Platt, co-founder and chief executive of BlueCrest, Europe’s fifth-largest hedge fund, is a serious figure who usually shuns the limelight.

He predicted quantitative easing would be required six months before the Bank of England fired up the presses. Now he and other hedge funds are betting that Britain will have no choice but to print its way into an inflationary spiral.

This is the key quote from his interview with James Macintosh:

“The easiest way for the system to be saved is to print money. It is the only policy option left.”