Tom Clark: Osborne cleverly sliced and diced the statistics
It was a clever budget, all right, but that’s clever in the smart-Alec sense. By contrast with the dreadful hand he had to deal with in many years past, George Osborne had a decent set of cards to play – more jobs, growth up, borrowing down – and yet this political playboy of a chancellor couldn’t resist overplaying it.
Statistics were sliced and diced to produce heartening lines. Take living standards – up by 5% since 2010, he said. Of course that will depend on which measure you use, but even if his number was right, one has to doubt whether the country will believe it. What Britain knows in its bones is not how things may have bumped up and down since 2010, but rather that there has been an almighty and relentless squeeze on families, ever since 2008.
Then there were some suspiciously good figures on the national debt – falling sooner than anyone had thought possible. Listen out for the experts on Thursday, to check whether the selling of long-term assets to raise short-term funds has contributed to this.
Finally, in the weird code of the SW1 debating club, Labour foxes were shot – particularly that autumnal line about the state being “pared back to the 1930s”. He killed that one off by stepping away from purely notional cuts pencilled in for the very end of the next parliament, for which he never had a developed plan. This could reassure a few political waverers – but only if they were listening. I doubt many were.
Polly Toynbee: more low pay, benefit cuts and a shrinking state
Tally ho, and off he set to shoot Labour foxes. But for all the chancellor’s gung-ho bravura, he was galloping backwards in full retreat from his autumn statement blunder revealing he would take the state back to the 1930s – austerity beyond anything ever tried.
That state-shrivelling £23bn surplus plan gave his game away, so now he cuts it back to £7bn – still austere, but less ostentatious. That lets him boast he is taking us back only to the Blair/Brown year of 2000. But that came after two of the most freakishly low spending years, glued to a Ken Clarke plan he said he’d never meant to stick to. It caused a winter NHS collapse, forcing Blair to dash to the TV studios to promise a colossal rise.
The NHS is back on life support, A&E bursting, GPs unable to cope. Yet the chancellor said nothing about the missing £8bn, the bare minimum the NHS requires – the oddest omission in a budget entirely devised to spike Labour guns.
No gimmicks or giveaways? There was one in every breath – from a penny off a pint to another disastrous help-to-buy boost to an already overheated housing market, when building is at its lowest for a century. Tax cuts were cunning: if Osborne and Clegg genuinely want to help the low paid they would raise the national insurance threshold but the personal tax allowance rewards their voters, most going to the richest half of households.
Essentially nothing much changed, despite this Wizard of Oz performance. Osborne’s long-term plan stays in the saddle, low pay, harsh benefit cuts and a permanently shrinking state – “a rollercoaster” warns the OBR.
Matthew d’Ancona: a sneak peak of better days to come
“The comeback country” – a payoff line that George Osborne has been longing to deliver for five years. This was the chancellor at his most confident, and most plausible, offering just enough goodies to keep the punters happy, but not so many that he surrendered the high ground of prudential statesmanship.
The speech, like the campaign of which it is a linchpin, was positively Manichean: competence versus chaos, wise saving versus “deeply irresponsible” expenditure, Tory security versus Labour disaster. But, for the first time in years, there was something more on offer than repair work and “difficult decisions”. Like a coming-soon trailer, this budget presented a sneak peek of better days to come, of the “view from the summit” of which David Cameron spoke at the Tory conference in 2009.
Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart – but it is also pretty certain to lose you elections. Cameron was swept to the leadership on a pre-crash tide of optimism, and here, almost a decade later, was his closest lieutenant – the very incarnation of blue-rosetted parsimony – daring at last to speak of a big step on “the road from austerity to prosperity”.
The texture of this speech, the audacity of its hope, mattered more than any of its component parts. The Tories won the battle to be seen as the party of competence long ago. What will make the difference between a merely decent election result and victory is their success or failure in persuading the voters that they mean it when they say that we are all in this together. The comeback country – yes. But the comeback party? We’ll find out in 50 days.
Rafael Behr: a vote-winning budget? The normal rules don’t apply
The economy that the chancellor describes should, according to the normal rules of politics, deliver clear election success to the government that managed it. Growth is up, unemployment is down and even living standards are said to be on the rise. (A claim the opposition will fiercely dispute.)
And yet, to George Osborne’s frustration, the normal rules are proving slow in applying themselves. Labour’s chances of forming the next government refuse to die. The reason? Even when people recognise that the overall state of the economy is improving, they don’t see how they personally will benefit. The Conservatives have talked relentlessly about their “long-term economic plan” but find that in marginal seats voters think it is not a plan for people like them – or rather, it is only a plan for people like Osborne.
So every measure in this budget is pointed towards one political goal, encapsulated in the new slogan: “An economic plan that is working for you.” Hence the help for the growing legions of the self-employed, tax cuts for low-to-middle income earners and the emphasis on investment outside the Tories’ south-eastern heartlands. Osborne wants to rebut the charge that his recovery is a Conservative members-only club.
He has always been more pragmatic than his enemies imagine. He also has a shrewder understanding than many of his colleagues of why it is that the Tories don’t seem to be getting as much credit for economic buoyancy as they feel they deserve. In many ways this was actually a very defensive budget, adapting to and neutralising Labour attacks, spraying out some one nation-style quasi-egalitarian rhetoric to cover up the stubborn smell of self-serving privilege clinging to the Tory brand.
A single budget won’t change the minds of people who decided long ago that the Conservative party wasn’t on their side. But the chancellor may have more success with the army of undecided voters who may feel financially insecure but recognise that overall the country is in ruder economic health now than in 2010. Precedent suggests they will jump to the safest place on polling day, which will be to the incumbent – if indeed the normal rules apply.
Aditya Chakrabortty: Osborne’s failed, yet he’s seen as a success
Allow me to advance a case: George Osborne today cemented his position as the most successful failure of this government. What do I mean by failure? Try delivering mediocre growth late in the day, rather than the boom we were originally promised back in 2010. Or retreating again and again on his own plans for tough-guy austerity – first in 2012, but again this afternoon. And finally, there was the sight of the savings-first chancellor blowing hard into a house-price bubble. All hail the help-to-buy Isa!
These aren’t minor slips, little boo-boos that can be overlooked. They go to the heart of the promises made by Osborne on moving into Downing Street – and the rhetoric he has used ever since. And yet the chancellor has got away with it. He talks about his “long-term economic plan” – and the BBC takes him as face value. The truth is that he keeps changing the plan, and has done ever since it became clear it wasn’t working. He points excitedly at some anaemic growth, and even the opposition have given up noting that this remains the weakest recovery in history. As for all the plans to rebalance the economy, to change the Brits from savers and spenders … no sooner does the chancellor mouth them then they are as good as forgotten.
Osborne has failed, and yet he is still hailed as a wild success, the steady-as-he-goes finance minister. The exact alchemy by which so much economic lead is turned into political gold will preoccupy future PhD theses and coalition biographies; but, on a day filled with as much hot air as this one, let me just point out that it goes on.
For my money, the big story in today’s budget is also one that bears out the theme. Just before Christmas, Osborne promised a budget surplus of £23bn by 2020 – thus opening himself up to the charge of being a deficit nutter and a mad shrink-the-stater. Undelighted by the Labour attack lines and the poor polling, today he changes his target. Now, the plan for 2020 is to be in the black by £7bn. A significant dilution of the austerity he promised just four months ago and a very effective way of moving the Conservative offer slightly closer to Labour’s. What a U-turn! But I suppose that won’t be the story that leads tomorrow’s papers.
