Well, I fell for it. George Osborne was going to slash police numbers, he was going to take away people’s tax credits, he was going to take an almighty axe to frontline public services. And he’s done none of them, apart from taking an almighty axe to frontline services, that is. With suicide murderers on the loose, he has taken the pragmatic and highly political course of not further cutting police numbers from the already inadequate current levels. “I love coppers”, said Gideon, forgetting to add that he’s spent the last five years cutting their numbers, cutting their pay and cutting their pensions. And tax credits? Well, Rupert Murdoch was on his case in all his newspapers. He was never going to disregard the man who wields the media power in Britain, was he? Especially not if he maintains any serious ambitions of moving next door in two years time with the Dirty Digger’s support.
I haven’t heard much from Osborne’s speech, little more than the headlines. Experience has taught me that below the headlines, there is always unpleasant news, hidden in the small print and sometimes it’s not there at all until someone finds it. And I was glad I didn’t hear it because the chancellor’s weasel-like, grating voice is as bad as fingernails down a blackboard to my ears. I was even more glad that I did not hear much of John McDonnell’s bizarre reply, most of which just had to have been written long before the autumn statement was even published, not least his hilarious “joke” about mass murderer Chairman Mao. But that’s for another day.
It still seems to me that behind the headlines, there are terrible cuts to come. The fat and indeed much of the flesh has long been chopped away in the public sector. Osborne is chipping away at bare bones now, although Prospect’s deputy general secretary Dai Hudd was stretching things a bit by declaring that civilian jobs in the MOD had been “cut to the bone” since 2010, so much so that civil service numbers in that department have been ballooning in recent years in jobs that pay far more than those in other government departments.
George Osborne’s genius is not in his work as chancellor but in getting people to believe what he says. When he talks about paying down the debt and running surplus budgets by 2020, he somehow forgets to mention that he has been responsible for cutting the national debt only by doubling it to $£1.5 billion. This economics malarkey can be tricky to follow sometimes.
Judging budgets (or rather autumn statements) in the days and hours that follow is a dangerous business because they have a habit of unravelling. Osborne’s “emergency” budget back in July saw the odious Iain Duncan Smith fist-pumping the announcement of the increase to the minimum wage, but many people failed to spot the toxicity of the tax credit cuts. By the autumn, people had worked out that the working poor, Osborne’s ‘strivers”, were to be hammered. We do not know, yet, what is beneath the surface of this statement but we will soon enough.
My initial reaction is that if Osborne gets away with this statement, the Tory leadership is his and as a direct result so is the PM job he so covets. Osborne has, in my view, greatly strengthened his position today but let’s see if he slashes elsewhere from the welfare budget to make up for the U turn.
It’s not as bad as we feared, but then it was the chancellor was putting it about how bad it would be. It still looks very bad to me, especially if you work for the public sector or use its services, so let’s not be distracted by Osborne’s smoke and mirrors. There is so much to oppose and we hope that Labour is up to opposing it.
