The European Commission will propose tomorrow that the UK's budget deficit be brought down from a prospective 12 per cent of GDP to just 3 per cent by 2014-15, requiring tax increases and public spending cuts as yet unimagined by the main political parties. It would mean about £25bn in spending cuts and tax rises every year.

Wheelchair-bound man faces life term for killing three civilians in Netherlands

The sheer terrible sobriety puts one in mind of Balka's other pessimistic works

Overseas universities are hoping to snap up British students during Clearing, says Zoe Flood

Why don't more British students head to the University of Maastricht, where they can take degrees in English and – best of all – pay lower fees than at home? By Lucy Hodges

Economic view

How 'austere' was the early 'IoS'? Well, the cry of 'Populism!' went up when I suggested running our first front-page picture of the Princess of Wales

Over the table and off the record – politicians speak

Rules, they say, are there to be broken but this is getting silly. Now that the two fiscal rules have been junked, ministers have little left in the way of an economic compass. The inflation target of 2 per cent has been missed more often than not recently; it hit 5.2 per cent in September, hopefully its peak.

The public finances are a car crash. That much we knew. What we did not realise until yesterday was just how mangled they are.

My older son takes a polite interest in politics. He's not obsessive about it, but knows who David Miliband is. "Is he running for prime minister?" he asked recently, having seen the fellow on some news clip. What an extraordinary question. I asked what had prompted it. "He's doing the voice," my son said, "and the gestures with his hands."

If you want to understand what is happening don't listen to the words; look instead at the numbers. It was curious, wasn't it, listening to the Budget speech yesterday. The words were the same as in the previous 10 Budgets: the self-congratulation, the repeated references to stability, the announcements of footling little bits of spending and of targets for 2050 and the glossing over of the bad news in the big numbers. But the person saying those words was different. It was almost as though the new Chancellor was reading out a speech written by someone else, his predecessor. Indeed I suspect in large measure that is what happened.

You can see why people climb cranes and get on the roof. People like to be heard, and be seen to be heard. The Prime Minister wants people to get involved in politics, but only in the approved way (voting Labour every four years).

In the final weeks of his troubled life, Vincent Van Gogh swung between emotional extremes. Lengthy periods of tortuous depression were punctuated by bursts of joy and creativity. The result, notably different in tone from the angst-ridden material he produced immediately before his suicide, was a set of child portraits that radiate the optimism and purity of youth.