All that is rotten and rancid

‘Tweet in haste, repent at leisure.’ When he tapped out his boast – #Google tax bill is a victory for the action we’ve taken – that fateful Saturday morning last month little did the chancellor know that days later he would be the laughing stock of Europe.

Our French amis pointed out that the £130m back taxes George had wormed from Google’s clutching grasp was around one third of the amount that they had secured.

Same thing with the Italian tax authorities. When Rupert Murdoch mega-phoned his ridicule through the editorial pages of the Sun and the Times, George must have started to seriously wonder if he will ever be able to measure the curtains for No 10.

Political observers are fond of comparing Osborne to Gordon Brown. A master strategist whose command bestrides Whitehall pulling all the levers of this government, the real power behind the throne, running the country while Dave struts about on the international stage.

But there is another comparison. He could well be a man whose ideas are out of step with the age.  Just as Gordon Brown paid the price for the global crash, with voters quick to forget that his spending had saved the NHS and turned around the Tory government’s poverty super-tanker, Osborne will fail because he has a tin ear for the mood of the people.

Outrage

The outrage over his obsequious treatment of Google grew to a crescendo just about the time the government was being told by the High Court that its bedroom tax on disabled people and women hiding from domestic violence was illegal. So not only is this tax disgusting, it is unlawful.

The government immediately announced it would appeal the ruling. There you had it – a vicious dedication to imposing tax pain on the most vulnerable but an intensely relaxed attitude to the tax dodging of obscenely profitable mega-corps.

I’ve said before that while Mr Osborne may win the race to succeed Cameron, he won’t make it to No 10. I need to revise that – I don’t think he’ll win the Tory leadership either now.  He has made too many poor calls politically, from his omnishambles budget to that hubristic tweet, but moreover he is not the financial genius hailed by his friends in the press.

The GDP figures at the end of January confirmed an increasingly unbalanced economy, ever reliant on the service sector and its low skills, low wages.

Manufacturing – the engine of wealth creation and the fund for our public services – languishes in recession, unloved and criminally neglected by a government that would rather ease workers’ paths to the dole queue than to be caught actively engaging in the economy.

Meanwhile, office of national statistics reveal that in the years that Mr Osborne has been at the Treasury helm, zero-hour contracts mushroomed from 0.6 per cent of the workforce to 2.7 per cent – a more than four-fold increase in vulnerable, hire and fire work.

Out of ideas

His plans for a fire sale of UK assets, dwarfing even previous Tory sell-off ambitions, remind us that he is out of ideas too. Reaching for the Thatcher playbook, he seeks to generate cash from these one-hit wonder sales to plug the holes in the economy left by the failures of his cuts-first, cuts-alone approach.

Trapped in his austerity-thought prison he is incapable of developing a strategy for economic growth and fairness based on investment and engaged government. The real life costs to real life people are not ever considered, just as it was with the tax credits debacle, while some pathetic pittance begged from big business is hailed as a wonder.

Labour is right to keep on the chancellor’s case. His economic credibility is in tatters; surely even fawning Tory MPs are pondering if they can dump their shares in Osborne?

When Tory guru Steve Hilton warns that this government’s besotted behaviour towards big business is clearing the way for a popular campaign to rein in capitalism’s worst offenders, the tide is turning.

Time, then, for a change of narrative. Labour did save our schools and hospitals, and stopped our banks from self-induced collapse so let’s take apart the claims of competency of a chancellor who chases away the sunshine and fails to fix the roof.

But moreover our party should be shouting loudly: it will take no lessons in fiscal responsibility from one that places greater priority on dragging battered spouses to court for £11.25 a week than on getting tax dodging companies to pay what they owe. Osbornomics is all that is rotten about this rancid government – and the people know it.

*First published in Tribune February 2016