Why did he have to sneer? On my rare social encounters with George Osborne, I have found him to be witty, open-minded and self-deprecating. Yet put him in front of a microphone or despatch box, and he speaks if he wants to pick a fight, by displaying his arrogance rather than his humanity.
Thus he talked today about his “one nation” Budget but his tone suggested a total failure to understand what Benjamin Disraeli was talking about. In his novel, Sybil, Disraeli referred to:
“Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.”
If Osborne truly feels an affinity with low income Britons in terms of habits, breeding, diet and manners, he hid his sympathy well.
Maybe the explanation is that Osborne doesn’t know his history. In the early 1990s, Labour proposed a national minimum wage. The Conservative employment secretary, Michael Howard, opposed the policy, saying it would destroy jobs and interfere with the freedom of employers and workers to negotiate the right pay. He mocked his Labour shadow, Tony Blair, for suggesting such a ridiculous idea.
A few years later, as we all know, Blair’s government brought in the minimum wage; it was a great social, economic and popular success; the Tories dropped their opposition and now Osborne, rightly, wants it to rise faster than inflation over the next five years.
Read more on the budget:
Osborne has learned the lessons of power
Verdict from the Prospect panel
A true blue triumph for Osborne?
One might have thought that the appropriate tone in today’s Budget would be that of a repentant sinner. Instead, Osborne rebadged it a “national living wage” and claimed it as a great Conservative innovation, alongside Victorian laws against the worst exploitation of workers, giving women the vote and council house sales.
Now, it’s fair to mention past Tory governments (though personally I’m sorry that he omitted from his list of triumphs taking Britain into the common market); but it takes a special chutzpah to compare with them a modest rise in the minimum wage when his own party opposed its introduction so vehemently.
Here’s a modest suggestion. Can we all agree that both main parties have got some things right and some things wrong down the years? In the past seven decades, it has taken Labour governments to establish the NHS and the welfare state, end capital punishment, legalise abortion, outlaw sex and race discrimination, introduce civil partnerships, eject most hereditary peers from the House of Lords and devolve power to Wales and Scotland. The Conservatives opposed most of these measures at the time but now accept them all—just as Labour has accepted most of the reforms of the Thatcher era.
Somehow, few politicians are able to credit the reforms of their opponents or admit the past shortcomings of their own party. Instead they insist on absurd tribal posturing. In so doing they belittle politics and belittle themselves.
Which, today above all, is a pity. Osborne is a highly intelligent man who has produced a highly intelligent Budget. I don’t like his social priorities, but I do see a Chancellor, freed from the need to satisfy coalition partners, who has set a new direction for Britain’s economy and society, based on ideas that deserve serious consideration. But his manner seems certain to provoke a knee-jerk partisan response from his opponents rather than a proper debate.
But then, maybe, that is precisely his intention. Maybe he applied his intelligence to the way he decided to present today’s Budget, and chose to sneer.
