Shadow chancellor thought quoting Mao Zedong was a masterstroke, but it simply let George and the Tories off the hookHe could have riffed on George Osborne’s feeble spots. It’s not as if he wasn’t spoiled for choice. He could have pointed out the autumn statement was predicated on the Office for Budget Responsibility finding £25bn of additional tax revenues down the back of the sofa in the four months since the last budget: money that could just as easily disappear back into the sofa in the next four months. He could have observed that the chancellor had just made affordable housing only slightly less unaffordable. He could have wondered why the Tory bar was now so low that George had got the biggest cheer for doing nothing by not cutting police funding.
He could certainly have made capital from Osborne screwing up working tax credits so badly in his preceding budget that he had been forced to arrive back to the Commons for a resit. He could have even gone into profit by noting that the chancellor had made himself look a halfwit by falling into his own welfare cap elephant trap. But the shadow chancellor doesn’t achieve capital or profit. He does dialectics. Apocalypse Mao.
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Source: theguardian.com