THE Chancellor of the Exchequer will find himself between the devil and the deep blue sea when he delivers his last Budget today.

Britain’s huge public spending deficit and national debt need addressing with urgent action.

Yet, you can bet your last dollar that Alistair Darling will duck the issue, preferring instead to fight the forthcoming General Election before wielding the axe against public spending or materially increasing the tax burden of the nation’s floating voters.

But, even looking at things from his own, narrow self-interest, delivering a neutral Budget may be the wrong thing to do. After all, inaction won’t go unnoticed, creating the risk that voters will think he is mismanaging the situation and that he has no answers to Britain’s £170bn public deficit.

The traditional temptation facing pre-election Chancellors is to offer bribes to the electorate. Do you recall Gordon Brown’s gesture of a 2p basic rate income tax cut ahead of the last election?

If Mr Darling resorts to bribery this time round, it would be greeted with not just cynicism, but probably derision as well, and not just from his obvious political opponents.

The real action to tackle the deficit is likely to come a couple of months after the election, when whoever wins the contest holds their first Budget.

The whole political situation is finely balanced. Things could just as easily backfire for the Tories as Labour. A decisive Budget would place the onus on David Cameron to detail what he would do differently. But decisiveness would be too daring for Mr Darling.

The fact that Labour is waiting to get through the election before doing anything drastic, or decisive, is reflected in last week’s unemployment figures.

According to official data, the public sector is still thriving and jobs are still being created, particularly in the NHS, which now employs 62,000 more staff than a year ago.

The NHS headcount has reached an all-time high of 1.62m. In contrast, jobs are still being lost in the private sector.

Worse still, the amount of “hidden” unemployment is rising. The recent run of monthly falls in unemployment masks a problem that is building up for the future.

Headline unemployment is falling, but this is due to more to people choosing to leave the workforce altogether than it does to robust economic conditions.

The total number leaving the workforce rose by 149,000 during the three months to January to take the economically inactive figure to 8.16m, another record high. Of that rise, 98,000 went into education, while others stayed at home to look after families or take early retirement. The number of people in work was 28.86m, which is 50,000 fewer than previously.

Another type of hidden unemployment is the more than 1m people in part-time jobs who would prefer full-time work.

Labour claims credit for Britain’s relatively low unemployment figures, but, given the analysis above, that appears hard to justify. People are adopting diverse strategies to avoid the dole queue. Nevertheless, whatever its cause, this hidden unemployment and continued public sector recruitment is storing up problems for the future.

The day will come when the spending axe falls and public service workers will lose their jobs in their thousands.

Those currently entering full-time education will come out the other end of the system needing to make a living. The longer the tough decisions are put off, the more it will hurt in the future.