Simon Carr: Johnson spoke, but where was the passion, the fury, the madness?

For an Autumn Statement it had a lot of spring about it. New growth. Happy colours. Something of a cuckoo, perhaps, making the most of the nest. George Osborne's good news wasn't strictly his to announce.

As Alan Johnson said, the better-than-expected figures are probably the result of last year's Labour. When George says he's "turning the tanker round", then, he might be turning it on to the rocks. If EDM needs a theme for PMQs he could do worse than this, but he'll have to ramp it up.

He needs a bit of the boastful Labourmania Gordon Brown used to do, if not to the same point of exhaustion. It's very important for Labour to win this argument or they'll lose the rest of the narrative. Nice Alan lacks the passion, fury or madness to project this, whatever it is – argument; narrative; hallucination.

Ed Miliband could probably do it, if he changed his medication. But is it true? Who cares – it's as true as anything else. If there is any science in grand economics we have to go to the Navier Stokes equations that govern fluid dynamics. It's like being in a maze and every time you take a step forward, the walls change.

Attractively, George Osborne is happy to admit the limits of their predictions and that he had chosen the central number in a "fan of forecasts". He said the independent office showed the deficit was shrinking, employment was rising, growth was growing. Others – and Tory Edward Leigh was among them – said the independent office showed the deficit was deepening, employment was shrinking, growth was decaying.

George said he was absolutely right to have taken the British economy "out of the danger zone".

"Rubbish!" Labour cried. Later he talked about what the economy was like in the danger zone. "Rubbish!" Labour cried. Their confusion was entirely honest and appropriate and would have gratified Monsieurs Navier and Stokes.

Some good, succinct points were made. Dave Watts said most of the cuts were going to fall in the North and most of the new jobs would occur in the South. Dennis Skinner asked why the Chancellor thought Irish banks were worth saving but Northern Rock wasn't. John Barron told us this recession was based on debt and you couldn't borrow your way out of it. And Charles Walker helped the Chancellor to a very fine Frankie Howerd moment by asking him whether he was going to reduce tax when he'd balanced the books. "I'm a fiscal conservative with a small C, but I'm a tax cutting Conservative with a big C," he told the Commons. No one dared laugh.

It's safe to say the parties agree to differ. But it won't matter a fig if, as may happen, the euro collapses and the world financial architecture falls like the temple of Jerusalem.

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