A CLOSER look at the government's Comprehensive Review confirms that Gordon Brown is staking all on the ability of the British economy to avoid the looming recession.
If, as many pundits are already predicting, the new upsurge in unemployment gathers pace, increasing the numbers claiming benefits and reducing the numbers paying taxes, the wheels could come off the whole plan.
Brown is also hoping against hope that inflation, which has only just edged below 4%, can be kept under control for the next three years, and that public sector workers - whose pay levels have lagged way behind inflation and settlements in the private sector - can be press-ganged into another three years of effective pay freeze, relieved only by dodgy "performance-related" deals as now proposed for teachers.
A massive fire-sale of government assets to raise a one-off total of £12 billion over three years has also been added into the sums, raising the question of what Brown would have left to flog off if Labour were to win a second term of office.
And the NHS and local government are being urged to enter into hugely-expensive schemes to build new facilities using the revamped Tory Private Finance Initiative - despite the fact that many councils are already ruing the long-term cost of similar "creative accountancy" schemes in the 1980s in which some sold off assets including their town halls, only to lease them back on exorbitant terms.
One significant area where there is no reference to PFI as a source of funding is defence. The navy has been assured of the capital to build two new giant aircraft carriers costing far more than the entire hospital building programme - but without having to rent them over the next 30 years from some consortium of City slickers.
The biggest loser of all in Brown's new regime is local government, where the fine print of Labour's commitment to end "crude and universal capping" of council taxes (and thus government-imposed cuts in services) has been applied quite literally: capping will continue, but in a more refined and subtle way.
New Labour is determined to protect local people not from cuts in vital services, but from "excessive council tax increases". A series of measures is designed to make life difficult for councils to raise the money needed to compensate for inadequate central government funding , and the "reinvigoration of local democracy" is clearly to revolve not around the provision of services but how low council taxes have been held.
There may be a local price to pay for some of these policies, with Labour-run councils forced to embark on a new round of controversial cuts, and carrying the blame for embarrassing shortfalls in services. Health authorities and Trusts, too are likely to forge ahead with high-profile plans to axe hospitals and beds based on the real figures of the spending review, not on the hyped-up version paraded by Brown and the media.
But clearly the government hopes that the 3-year spending review will enable them to meet a strategic target of withdrawing into the background as these cuts take shape and leaving local bodies to take the blame, while evading the annual debate over levels of public spending - possibly until after the next election.
Their hope - based on a cynical estimate of the feeble stance of public sector union leaders - is that campaigners seeking to reverse local cuts, and public sector workers fighting for decent wage increases will be deterred by the way in which budgets appear to have been firmly battened down for three years to come.
It's up to us to prove them wrong.