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?
