The Guardian view on the budget aftermath: the elusive heart of Osbornomics
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Version 0 of 1. The chancellor wowed Westminster, where he is now hailed as a master strategist, architect of a budget as savvy as it was shameless, recycling ideas from an unlikely source: Ed Miliband’s manifesto. Living wages, obligations on firms to fund training, an assault on non-doms. Some in Labour had concluded that these things had been buried along with the Ed Stone, all part of an unelectably anti-business agenda. George Osborne sees things differently. For he understands one of the great truths of politics, that what you say – even what you do – sometimes matters less than who you are. If Mr Miliband, or any Labour politician, had driven a coach and horses through the independent Low Pay Commission process for setting the minimum wage, as the chancellor did, the strident end of the business lobby would have started plotting a coup. Dark suspicions about Labour reverting to socialist type would have been confirmed. But when it’s a Tory chancellor chucking diktats about what firms should pay across the dispatch box, businesses can and did moan, but they cannot imagine that they are witnessing an anti-capitalist revolution. Another thing that the chancellor grasps is that – in shaping the discourse – repeated words can count for more than deeds. Within days of Lehman Brothers toppling, he was telling the Conservative conference that the “cupboard is bare”. He has never changed his tune since, but he has frequently changed his policy. After his retrenchment snuffed out the first flush of the recovery, he slowed the pace so far that he didn’t eliminate the deficit by 2015, as he had promised, but got only half way. Yet another rule from the Osborne manual of statecraft is that incumbency is all. As the opposition anguished about how to nip and tuck around his savage spending plans, he simply rewrote them whenever he felt the need. The Guardian argued last year that his back-to-the-30s autumn statement could not be serious, and indeed it wasn’t: by the spring, he pencilled in a ludicrous rollercoaster ride for public expenditure, following years of crashing cuts with a sudden splurge. This week he has rewritten the plan once again, letting slip that the surplus that he always insists is his most urgent priority will not now materialise for yet another year. The hunt is on to find an overarching Osbornomics – to compare with, say, Thatcherite neoliberalism, or the Brownian programme of skimming the profits of a ruthless capitalist economy to compensate the people left behind. This hunt is doomed to fail. For with this chancellor, the substance is as slippery as the rhetoric is steadfast. Some think they can spot one deadly serious purpose: rolling back the state. But whereas before the election, Mr Osborne suggested that they could balance the books without any rise in taxes, this week he put them up by a net £6.5bn, which would be a betrayal for a small-state fundamentalist. He may prod companies to do things on pay and training he does not wish to fund, but only as a pragmatic way out of a fix. Don’t expect him to reveal a hidden dirigiste vision, or a lurking desire to take corporate power to task. This is a man who came to political consciousness in the Thatcherite 80s, and who cut the bank levy only this week. The Institute for Fiscal Studies was left earnestly scratching its head, trying to find a pattern in tax reforms, which – among other things – retarded the goal of consistent treatment of carbon, and redoubled the vast fiscal privileges of owner-occupied housing. Analysts always bemoan politicians’ disdain for evidence-based policy, but with Mr Osborne we are seeing something beyond that: disdain for consistent policy of any sort, save for that which yields political advantage. And, in his analysis, political advantage comes from rallying all those who don’t rely on state support against those who do. In a budget that was as intellectually scrappy as it was cunning, that is about the only consistent logic. |