Today's papers react to the chancellor's spending review.

Independent

The simple truth is that the impressive spending increases for almost all government departments announced yesterday will only be affordable if the public sector manages to cut costs. And cut them quite significantly. If it fails, the chancellor will have no choice but to raise taxes or borrow - either of which would be massively damaging to the ambitions of both Mr Brown and his party.

FT

Perhaps aware of where the real challenges and uncertainties lie, Mr Brown's Commons speech yesterday addressed the problem of absenteeism in the civil service before it got round to saying how much would be spent on the defence of the realm. But the jury is very much out on whether his target of £21.5 billion a year in savings, and efficiency gains of 2.5 per cent a year across the public sector, are feasible.

Times

Assuming that Labour wins the next election, the chancellor - and perhaps soon-to-be prime minister - will face a dilemma. His extra sources of revenue will be more or less exhausted, and the people will be in no mood to pay more tax. Public services, after ten years of generous investment, will no longer be able to blame lack of money for poor performance. The focus will then inevitably fall upon their management, their structure and their operational practices. Mr Brown, in whatever role he has then, will be held to account for the numbers he announced yesterday.

Guardian

This was a pre-electoral statement on two levels. Strategically, the chancellor had already set in stone a pre-Budget spending spree - focused on public spending - two years ago, when he laid down large increases in spending on health and education, without breaching his "golden rule" of balancing all spending (other than capital investment) over the economic cycle. Yesterday he added a tactical element by using unallocated cash to plug any gaps the opposition might exploit before the election, likely to be in less than a year's time.

Telegraph

A chancellor need only keep the ship of state on an even keel. The economy is sound, interest rates low, growth healthy. Mr Brown can and does take credit for all this. Mr Blair will be blamed if Thursday's by-elections are lost. But mastery of one's brief is not the same as leadership. Mr Brown has often demonstrated the virtues of patience and consistency, but he has yet to show true courage. That is why, for all his doubts, Mr Blair has decided to stay the course - and is right to do so.

Sun

What matters to voters is not just the quantity of money spent on public services, but the quality of services that money produces. There is much Sun readers will welcome from the chancellor. The promise of 120,000 more childcare places and nursery education for two-year-olds will help working parents. New resources to tackle youth crime and anti-social behaviour will help everyone. Cracking down on the sicknote culture is long overdue. We hope Brown succeeds in driving through the radical reforms needed to balance the books. If he doesn't, we won't know for four or five years. Sadly, by then it will be too late.

Express

Tinkering with numbers that will almost certainly shift and change as sand in his hands will not even begin to tackle the problem of bureaucratic bloating that now exists throughout the civil service. Mr Brown is carrying on as if he were doing us a favour: the truth is that those jobs should never have been created in the first place.

Mirror

This was a politically, as well as economically, astute performance from the chancellor. He knows the people's priorities and what he believes needs to be done to make this country strong and prosperous. Can he do it? His track record is impeccable. Under him, Britain has enjoyed the longest sustained period of growth in modern times. Now he also aims to solve the problems of the health service, education and even law and order. It is a massive undertaking. But it is in all our interests that he succeeds.

Mail

Time will tell whether Mr Brown's gambles come off. For now, he can fairly claim to have confirmed his reputation as this government's greatest asset - this when Mr Blair faces such potential damage to his own reputation in tomorrow's Butler report.