George Osborne didn’t deliver a budget on Wednesday (‘Here comes the sun’, 19 March). He delivered a party political broadcast in the Commons on behalf of the Tory party in which macroeconomic analysis of the state of the economy, the real purpose of budget statements, was almost totally absent. It was an abuse of parliament, and even worse the sparse economic narrative he provided was based on fake figures.
His strategy revolves round his eliminating the structural deficit and indeed securing, as he boasts, a £7bn surplus (originally £23bn) on the national accounts by 2019-20. But his pathway to achieving this objective is shown by the Treasury’s own red book to be pure fantasy. The rate at which the deficit has been reduced so far by Osborne’s austerity budgets has averaged just £7bn a year, and the deficit still stands today at a huge £90bn. Yet apparently the deficit will go down by £15bn next year and then by a whopping £36bn the year after, then by £27bn the following year, and then by £18bn in 2018-19. These are confetti figures scattered around without a word of explanation, simply invented to generate a political feel-good story for which there is not a shred of evidence.
This is the most enormous con being perpetrated on the British people. A manifestly failed austerity policy which is reducing the deficit at a glacial pace, if at all, is dressed up as a monumental success in the future. This is exactly the same trick that he pulled in 2010 when he pledged to cut the deficit by 2015 to £37bn; it is actually today two-and-a-half times bigger. Either these deficit reduction claims are wildly exaggerated, in which case all the pain and anguish of austerity has been almost for nought; or Osborne does try somehow to ram them through, in which case monumental cuts in benefits and departmental expenditure will be imposed on a scale four or five times bigger than anything experienced so far. There’s no way the nation would stand for that and it’s bound to lead to an explosion on the streets. Osborne’s budget arithmetic is just nonsense.
Michael Meacher MP
Labour, Oldham West and Royton
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