Peter Edwards: We still haven't had the last word over cuts

Of course, the deficit reduction will be swift and painful, whatever happens, with Yorkshire taking an unreasonably large share of the pain. But as the fiasco over planned child benefit cuts showed earlier this month, policy is only set in stone until someone in the Cabinet changes their mind.

The subsequent u-turn, worked out during the Conservative party conference, illustrates how the detail of the CSR will inevitably be up for negotiation, despite the Chancellor's insistence there is "no plan B" for the economy.

Osborne appeased his own backbenchers – never an easy thing – as well as his Liberal Democrat colleague and also the markets. That's before you consider any of the other factors that could yet sway his decisions – a plunge back into recession, falling Tory poll ratings or even the traditional handbagging from an irate voter who has seen their sick benefit wrongly reduced or axed.

That's before you add in the economic woes of America, which is on the verge of effectively printing more money, known technically as quantitative easing. A near-collapse in the sub-prime mortgage market was, of course, a major factor in the onset of the credit crisis more than three years ago.

So rather than representing the final word of the Government's cuts plan, Wednesday's blitz of announcements actually inaugurates a new phase, in which the fight over the details moves from the corridors of Whitehall into the public arena. The cuts announced in the CSR should come with a health warning akin to that of any television advert for investment wizardry: final totals could go down as well as up.

MUCH shock and horror at the escalating street protests in France over the raising of the retirement age. Not at the riots, of course, which along with tear gas, interruptions to the fuel supply and strikes, appear to be an annual tradition across the Channel, but at the fact French workers have been awarded part of their pension at 60.

This is astonishing. Contrast it with Britain, where George Osborne's decision to lift the retirement age for both men and women to 66 was greeted with merely a shrug of the shoulders – although not a Gallic shrug. It's incredible that the French are so upset at Nicolas Sarkozy's plan to make them work until the age of 67. When I reach that age (in 2043) I will still have years of work stretching out before me.

Continual lifting of the retirement age, as well as soaring inflation, mean I will probably still be stuck behind a desk when I'm 85, struggling to pay off the multiple mortgages I took out many years earlier on my 10m one-bedroom starter home.

So if I was a middle-aged Frenchman today I would retreat from the picket line, head back to my work or university and wile away the hours contemplating how I would spend my long, indolent retirement. Our long-term rivals appear to have got one over on the toiling Brits. Perhaps, for the first time in my life, I wish I was French.

TIMING is everything, as any sportsman will tell you. Wayne Rooney's now abandoned demand to leave Manchester United, whether because of lack of trophies or a lack of money – three titles in four years, wages of more than 100,000 a week – was timed extraordinarily badly, coming when hundreds of thousands of British workers fear losing their jobs.

In fact, he only needed to look across the Old Trafford dressing room to see that Boy's Own Heroes who trade one big club to another in search of greater success don't always find it.

Michael Owen jumped ship from Liverpool, his boyhood club in 2004, and played well at Real Madrid before being left out, was then injured for much of his time at Newcastle, before joining Man Utd, where he was again left out. Meanwhile, his England career has faded away. Aged 30, he must wonder exactly where the last six years have gone. And Rooney must be glad he is staying put... for now.