With the opinion polls locked, the Conservative party was looking today to George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to deliver it an electoral victory. It was, as expected, a decidedly political Budget and if the stalemate breaks in the polls, that Conservative boost will no doubt be attributed to it. That, however, would be an error. The Budget will not prove to be the cause of a Conservative recovery in the polls. The Budget is just the occasion on which the facts get read out and the facts determine the politics.
George Osborne’s strategy was clear enough. He wanted to recover his reputation for being the man with the “long term” plan to cut the deficit and pay down debt. The claim of stability is more important that some of the expected pre-election bribes. Many Conservative MPs wanted tax cuts but that would have cut across Mr Osborne’s central message which is that the task of repairing the public finances has not yet been completed. In that context, not giving any presents offers more of a political dividend than doing so. The election lines are sharpened and ready—Britain is on the right road, don’t turn back; this is a plan that is working.
There was, indeed, a deeply political mood to the Budget. The Chancellor mischievously took a series of Labour plans and rendered them all more difficult. He took money from the pension pot that Labour had earmarked as the source of its plans to pay for cutting tuition fees. By making use of an obscure definition of living standards, the Chancellor was able to maintain that people were better off in 2015 than they had been in 2010. Ed Miliband’s reply to the Budget shows that this remains Labour’s only workable economic retort to the good news on employment and growth that Mr Osborne read out with such relish.
Read more on the budget:
Give voters the state they want
Farage: we’d only support a “responsible” budget
The other line that Labour has been developing is that the Tories would take public spending down to levels last seen in the 1930s. The connotations of the low, dishonest decade are deliberate but Labour will struggle to make their case stick now. In the Autumn Statement the Chancellor had pledged to create a surplus of £23bn by 2019. The implied scale of spending cuts, to police and defence for example, was alarming. The drastic nature of the austerity was widely seen as a mistake and the number derided as unrealistic, indeed even dishonest. In this Budget Mr Osborne “spent” some of the money he was planning to save. The upshot is that the surplus will be £7bn if all goes according to plan and spending will fall only to the level it reached in 2000 (which was 36 per cent of GDP). There were plenty of mentions of France, the clear implication being that if elected Ed Miliband would be the new Francois Hollande.
The Budget was not without its problems and unanswered questions. This has still been, for all Mr Osborne’s triumphalism, the slowest recovery on record. The debt is coming down at a rate that is slower than the plan Alastair Darling had which Mr Osborne denounced. Mr Osborne’s demand that Britain become “the most prosperous nation in the world” is either meaningless or unlikely.
That said, the mood in the chamber of the House of Commons suggested the Chancellor got away with it. The Labour benches were sombre as the feeling spread that all Ed Miliband’s attack lines had been met. He used them anyway but the sense of time running out for Labour was palpable. This was not so much the moment that George Osborne secured main party status for the Conservatives. It was the day he took a lot of Labour failings and read them out in public.
