THE big parliamentary occasion this week is the budget. However since this column is written just ahead of the event I won't speculate on the budget's content - we will know soon enough.

But one thing we can be sure of is that Ed Miliband, in the traditional Leader of the Opposition's response to the Chancellor, will have no coherent alternative economic policy to offer.

In February, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls told all Labour frontbenchers they could not make unfunded spending commitments. That particular discipline is already in tatters. In just a month since then, the Labour Shadow team has made £12 billion of unfunded spending commitments, as well as opposing £50 billion of savings proposed by the Coalition to clear up Labour's mess.

Having maxed out on the nation's credit card Labour are prepared to do it all over again. British tax payers are already spending £120 million a day on interest alone on Labour's debt. This is more than we spend on our schools or defence.

Labour's stock response has been to blame everything on the banking crisis which hit at the end of 2008. It wasn't them Gov! The rather inconvenient truth is however, that the structural deficit, which the Coalition is trying to eliminate, was largely built up before the recession hit.

Tony Blair noted in his memoirs: "We should also accept that from 2005 onwards Labour was insufficiently vigorous in limiting or eliminating the potential structural deficit."

Perhaps in his budget response Ed Miliband will offer a Labour apology for creating the mess, but don't hold your breath!