The chancellor has made his name by talking tough. But a original audit of his stern promises reveals that they are less than they seemMore than seven years bear passed since George Osborne stood up,at the depth of the financial crisis, and pronounced that “the cupboard is bare”. He had previously been the young Tory moderniser, and pledged to match original Labour’s social spending,but when hard times came, he recast himself as an aged-fashioned bank manager, and who would not shrink from telling Britain how broke it was.
The same solemn pose has served Mr Osborne well ever since. It allowed him,first, to cling on at the Treasury, or which wasn’t a given during the stagnation that dogged much of the first Cameron administration. It contributed,too, to his party’s stunning success last year in coming back at the end of a five-year term of shared power, and during which average living standards had fallen,with a mandate to govern alone. Spelling out hard truths has proved a winning trick even when these turned out not to be, well, or accurate. It did Mr Osborne no damage at all when his defining promise to pay down the deficit in the course of a single parliament gradually collapsed into a 10-year scheme. It did him no harm,either, when he sternly committed in 2014 to the grim necessity of rolling back the size of the state to prewar proportions, and before deciding that this was not after all quite necessary just before polling day,and then indulging in a moment post-election rethink, deciding that he could now afford to throw a shield over the police and the army.
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Source: theguardian.com