Half a job George

“Mr Speaker, I have failed”, Chancellor George Osborne will tell the Commons on budget day. “Because I have failed we need five more years of austerity and massive cuts across public services.”

 
That’s what Osborne would say if he was telling the unvarnished truth. Instead of having seen off the austerity measures brought on by the failure of US banks, it’s more of the same.

 
He’s from the ‘Benjamin Franklin school of failure.’ Osborne has not failed, he’s just found a hundred ways to get it wrong.

 
What we’re left with is a job half done by half a job George. He’s like the builder who turns up, takes the money and builds you half an extension.

 
He wants more money and more time to build the other half. But if you go to another builder, half a job George will tell you, well that will just be chaos.

 
Half a job George’s austerity choke hold was so great it held back economic growth. He delivered spending cuts, but the taxes coming in (the other half of the equation) were choked off to a dribble.

 
His own target for cutting the deficit by this budget? Missed by a mile.

 
Debt coming down? No, it’s going up.

 
Lower living standards

 
For the first time in living memory, living standards will be lower at the end of a parliament than at the beginning. There are more jobs, but most of those created are low paid precarious jobs punctuated by the huge rise in “zero hours” contracts and fake self-employment.

 
A weak pulse of economic growth. But not much more than can be accounted for by population rise.

 
Wages which have lost their buying power so badly, the last time it happened on this scale General Gordon was holding out in Khartoum against the Mahdi and the Zulus were beating us up.

 
Inflation dropping to such low levels – itself a worry – that even stagnant wage growth is now above some measures of inflation.

 
But trust half a job George and read his lips when he tells us: No giveaways. No gimmicks.

 
Sure. If he’s true to form he’ll be pulling out more rabbits than Cadbury’s have chocolate Easter bunnies.

 
He won’t miss out on some giveaways, he rarely does. Tweaking the tax thresholds, nibbling at national insurance.
Or announcing it but delaying implementation.

 
And, his track record of a giveaway to the wealthy in numerous tax breaks but a takeaway from the poor by freezing benefits. Perhaps something different this time, but read the small print.

 
Maybe tax cuts if you take parts of your pension as lump sum. Or sell your pension annuity. The next mis-selling scandal just waiting to happen, but it gets a headline for a day.

 
Does he have a real plan to bring the NHS back from the brink of collapse? Maybe some money like the ÂŁ1.2m flashed last week to shore up mental health services.

 
Except when you look at the small print of that you find that is over 5 years, there is no one to staff the initiative, they have not been trained yet. And because of this, no treatment targets have been set.

 
Or maybe it’s some more money to the NHS as a whole. Or will that just be thrown at private health providers to give us sub-standard care?

 
And the chronic and growing housing shortage? Government policy is aimed at owning homes rather than what you need to do to build them in the first place.

 
The autumn statement made clear the long-term intent – a rapid shrinking of the state to pre-welfare state levels. Half a job George will want to tweak spending enough so he can throw the Institute of Public Finance off the end of Wigan Pier.

 
But the ideological intent remains stark. Massive cuts to come and still the loss of another 1 million public sector jobs.

 
Half a job George and the ConDems hope if they keep saying long term economic plan long enough the public will start to believe there is one.

 
There are only two dates in the plan: March 30 when Parliament is dissolved and the general election starts. Polling day itself on May 7 when the coalition faces the music.

 
There’s nothing more long-term than that, no matter what he says.

 
Let’s hope the coalition theme tune at the end of that day is D.I.V.O.R.C.E