THROUGH last week’s controversial announcement about child benefit cuts, Chancellor George Osborne displayed a basic lack of mathematical logic: families with one person earning more than £43,875 would be targeted for the cut but families with two earners on a joint income of £87,000 would go untouched. Not very clever.

We now have a Shadow Chancellor who, by his own admission, is an economic novice.

Asked what his first move would be in his new role, Mr Johnson joked that it would be to “pick up a primer in economics for beginners”.

The truth is that Mr Johnson is a political, rather than economic, appointment.

He has been chosen not for his deeply economic thinking but as a Blairite balance to the “Red Ed” label acquired by Labour’s new leader.

As a “deficit denier”, Ed Balls would have been easy prey for the Coalition Government, which has won the argument that we need to start filling the black hole.

We concede, as do most people, that public sector cuts are required. Compared to what the private sector has gone through, there is waste to be removed from the public sector.

Our concern – one that was echoed by Mr Johnson yesterday – is that there is a real danger of sparking a double-dip recession by cutting so quickly and so deeply that confidence ebbs away.

Alan Johnson may be the man to balance the new-look Labour Party, but he has a long way to go to prove he is capable of producing a credible alternative to the Government’s plan to balance the nation’s books.