Budget 2015: political tricks but no rabbit out of the hat
In the end it was the Tommy Cooper version of the rabbit in the hat trick when the rabbit never appears.
There were a few tricks completed though.
Trick one was finding the state spending level that existed in 2000, before Gordon Brown took the brakes off, and working back from that to match it – in the process, he hopes, killing off the Office for Budget Responsibility’s verdict on his autumn statement spending projection saying it would mean the lowest level (as a percentage of GDP) since the 1930’s.
The Lib Dems’ Vince Cable said the Tories’ plans were still pretty 1930’s-looking even if they had toned them down a bit. The Lib Dems make a separate announcement on their Budget plans tomorrow in the Commons.
The other Osborne trick was quite daring: turning round to voters who insist they feel worse off and telling them they’re not – they’re just not paying attention to the statistics.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies haven’t crunched the “£900 better off after five years” number, but make the point that in percentage terms it’s about as much as an average household would expect to feel better off after one year in normal – as opposed to post-2008 – times.
Ed Miliband made much of it in his response to the Chancellor, saying the country didn’t need a change of statistical measurements but a change of government.
The Resolution Foundation disputed the numbers, saying George Osborne’s favoured measurement included all sorts of things people wouldn’t consider part of their household budget.
The Resolution Foundation thinks average incomes are still around 4 per cent below their pre-downturn peak, and are still some way below their 2010 level.
George Osborne decided that a gift rabbit would damage his reputation for prudence. He wanted to talk of “comebacks” and sunshine without letting voters think they could relax and spend more than his plans.
Ed Miliband looked very fed up with George Osborne when the Chancellor announced a review of deeds of variation (the inheritance tax “minimisation” measure adopted by Ed Miliband’s mother).
He clearly thought it was beyond the pale to make such a personal attack and based on what he’s said in the past I suspect he sees it as the Chancellor effectively dragging his mother into the politics of the day.
He did eventually laugh at one of the second kitchen jokes, but then got up and delivered some personal attacks of his own attacking trust fund/Bullingdon types.
That was listened to by the Chancellor’s father and mother, Sir Peter and Lady Osborne. (Along the bench from them watching from the peers’ gallery Peter Mandelson sat next to Jeffrey Archer and David Cameron’s college friend Andrew Feldman. A future rainbow coalition or, as one Labour peer coined them “the Emmerson Lake and Palmer of the Lords.”)
The OBR says it doesn’t really have a clue how much take-up there will be of the new first-time buyers scheme – a merged product based on ISAs and right to buy.
A government spokesman described it as the merger of two of the government’s best “brands”, which made me briefly wonder if the entire project had been worked back from that key observation.
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