Osborne's CSR and the ghost of Gordon.

  We were warned in advance that it was going to be the most savage round of public spending cuts since the Geddes Axe nearly ninety years ago. An unprecedented  25-40% reduction in departmental spending.  The state would be reduced to a forest of bleeding stumps, forecast Labour,  after George “slasher” Osborne had swung his Condem chopper.   In the event, the headline cuts in departmental spending were only 19% - which is actually less than the former Labour chancellor, Alistair Darling had planned.  How they guffawed  on the Tory benches as Labour’s shadow chancellor, Alan Johnson tried to respond to one of the cleverest, and arguably the most cynical spending statements since, well, since the days of Gordon Brown.  

    

     George Osborne’s CSR had a remarkable similarity to one of Brown’s classic budget speeches. The hectic delivery,  the gratuitous self-congratulation, the blizzard of spending initiatives from Crossrail to the widening of the A11 around Norwich, which for some reason provoked cheers from Tory benches.  Cuts? What cuts? Pensioners are to keep their winter fuel allowances and free TV licences.  Child benefits for 18 year olds remain. Museums and galleries stay free.  

Mad Max Budget - but is he serious?

After a stunned silence after the most draconian budget in modern times, the country is waking up to what the new age of public austerity will actually mean.  Commentators paint a picture of a Mad Max dystopia - a country plunged into depression and decay.  Crumbling schools, empty swimming pools, leisure centres boarded up.  Feral children running riot as police numbers are cut.   Potholes in the road filled with rubbish uncollected.   A million public sector workers sacked;  families evicted after losing housing benefits; strikes and civil unrest returning to the streets of Britain after nearly thirty years.  Yes, it’s pretty grim. 

    So grim in fact that people are beginning to wonder if  George Osborne really means it.  Was the budget just a ploy to sound tough?   Will it all be quietly laid to rest before the comprehensive spending review in the autumn spells out exactly where the cuts will fall?   It’s actually very difficult to know how you go about cutting departmental spending by 25% in real terms.  Do you throw a quarter of prisoners out of jail?  Close a quarter of all libraries, museums, schools? You can't just sack social workers when there are statutory responsibilities like child protection.    Health and overseas aid are the only departments given a clear exemption from the cuts, but even here there will be cost implications of the increase in VAT to 20%.

Osborne's Bullingdon Budget

  Prepare for a hot autumn, comrades: the class war starts here.  Labour have hoist the red flag over Westminster and are preparing bonfires for the Liberal Democrat “collaborators”.  This budget, they say, was  Bullingdon Man taking his “ideological” retribution against the state using the coalition as cover.  It will hit people on low and middle incomes hardest, throw hundreds of thousands out of work, create fear and insecurity among benefits claimants and the disabled.   But the question is: was there any alternative, given Britain’s wrecked finances? Or was this, as the Chancellor put it, the “unavoidable budget”?   

  It is certainly a radical, even a revolutionary budget.  A 25% real terms cut in non-protected government departments in four years. A fiscal consolidation of nearly £120bn by 2015.   The rollback of the state implied by this Budget is simply unprecedented in modern British history.   We are talking tens of thousands of public sector jobs going, services like education, housing, transport, police and social work slashed.  Margaret Thatcher never tried anything so ambitious. George Osborne said he was seeking a deficit reduction on the ratio of 80% spending cuts to 20% tax increases.  She only managed about a fifty fifty split in her early budgets, and public spending actually went up during he 1980s. Can he be serious?