Daily catch-up: Tax credits crisis – another month before Osborne acts

Plus the study of history and what the Dutch got in exchange for New York

The growing crisis in the Government over the cuts to tax credits due to start in April continues. Emran Mian, director of the Social Market Foundation and a former civil servant with experience of big Treasury policy-making, has an excellent explanation of why the Chancellor's problem is so difficult:

Before the Chancellor announced cuts to tax credits at the Summer Budget, you’d better believe that he looked at numerous alternatives. He knew his aim: to remove an overall £12bn from the welfare budget. There were lots of different ways to do that. You may disagree with every one of them but nevertheless he examined the alternatives and made a choice...

The tax credit changes don’t exist in isolation either. Without £12bn of cuts to the welfare budget, the Chancellor only achieves his fiscal objective of a budget surplus by the end of the Parliament if he cuts some other item by more than he is planning to do; or raises revenue from some change that he wasn’t previously considering...

The Chancellor does have one final option. He could change his fiscal objective – target a smaller surplus, or settle for a minor deficit by the end of the Parliament – but then that undermines what is supposed to be his central narrative for this Parliament: to fix the roof while the sun is shining.

Torsten Bell, who used to work for Ed Miliband and how heads the Resolution Foundation, makes similar points.

I wonder, though. The actual cuts to tax credits save only £3.3bn (the rest of the savings come from freezing all benefits, including tax credits but excluding the state pension, restricting tax credits to two children for new claims, and some smaller items). That is the sort of sum that can be lost or gained in squinting at the figures from a slightly different angle, and who knows whether the Office for Budget Responsibility will forecast a slightly more benign path for the economy by the time of the Autumn Statement?

The combined Autumn Statement and Spending Review is on 25 November. Only another month of rising panic among Conservative MPs to go.

• My friend and former colleague Matt Hoffman says: "Every day since Corbyn became Labour party leader, I've thought of this cartoon."

• Another friend, Citizen Sane, had a little sing-song yesterday:

"New Amsterdam, New Amsterdam, so good they changed its name to New York."

This prompted TommyBD ‏to ask a quiz question: "What did the Dutch get in the trade?"

I had no idea. The answer is that they gave us New Amsterdam and we gave them Run, the last of the Spice Islands (Banda Islands, part of Maluku or Moluccas, Indonesia) that they didn't already control, thus giving them a monopoly of nutmeg, which grew only there. In fact the whole Treaty of Breda, 1667, was pretty extraordinary.

• And finally, thanks to Tony Cowards ‏for this:

"A horse walks into a bar. Showjumping at its very worst."