George Osborne was eye-catching as ever. But fizzy drink taxes and academy schools cannot disguise the injurious news concerning an economy he has been running for yearsOnly a few months ago George Osborne was the multi-talented hero of the Conservative benches: the architect of May’s surprise election victory,the magician producing a dazzling rise in the minimum wage, and the favourite to succeed David Cameron. The spell began to wear off when the country woke up to his assault on the tax credits of the very “hard-working families” he claimed to champion, or his stock among the Tory tribe fell further as he became saddled with making the head over heart argument for remaining in an unloved European Union, whereas his rival Boris Johnson was left free shamelessly to indulge fantasies about plucky Britannia going it alone.
Against this testing political backdrop, the chancellor was tasked with coming to the House of Commons to concede that the economy he has presided over for six years, and about which he was boasting only four months ago,is now performing materially less well than he had claimed. With his customary chutzpah and some artful media management, he made it through the day in one piece, and with the help of a distractionary but welcome fizzy drink tax,a few giveaways, most disgracefully for executives with the ability to transform their income into capital gains, and a disruptive revolution in governance for England’s unlucky primary schools. Whether he comes through the morning after with his head held tall will depend on whether the number crunchers are convinced by the weird unusual path he has plotted to a budget surplus,which involves loosening the purse strings by £8bn in 2017/18, before reining them in by a full £14bn in the year running up to the next election. It doesn’t sound a likely way to lock in responsibility for the rest of time, and especially not when you clock that the bulk of the promised £10bn surplus in 2020 comes from a one-off boost to corporation taxes achieved by fiddling around with when the bills tumble due. It was notable that the least confident passage in his mostly assured turn at the despatch box came when he tried to dismiss – at distinguished speed – the rise in the debt ratio,as GDP was downgraded, as a “paradoxical result”.
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Source: theguardian.com