Expectations ahead of George Osborne’s speech today were high. Osborne has attacked every single measure that Alistair Darling has taken to support British families and businesses through the recession, and every effort taken by the Labour government to invest in the jobs and skills of the future, to ensure that, unlike in the 1980s and 90s, a generation of young people are not confined to the scrap heap.
So what, we are surely entitled to ask, would the Tories do instead? Eric Pickles said yesterday afternoon that ’by this time tomorrow you should know just about everything‘. But we don’t. And, quite frankly for an opposition party that sees itself as the government in waiting, the lack of detail that still persists, seven months from what is likely to be polling day, is not acceptable. What would the shadow chancellor spend this year, what would he spend next year? Those are the questions voters are legitimately asking. Today Osborne ducked the key questions, aiming for the one-liners and easy headlines instead.
Let’s look at what we have been told. Well, there are a lot of headline-grabbing (but not revenue-raising) gimmicks – cutting the number of MPs, cutting ministers’ salaries (but given 19 members of the shadow cabinet are millionaires, they’ll not likely notice), and cutting pensions for new MPs.
Those who work in public service will also have their real pay cut (saving £3.2bn a year) – but unlike Darling, Osborne is talking not just about mandarins in Whitehall, but also the district nurse, the classroom teacher and the police sergeant. But, as far as I am aware it is not nurses, doctors or police who caused the economic crisis, but rather some greedy bankers – but all they got was a warning. Because of course regulating their city backers does not fit in with Tory ideology of a smaller state. It’s all well and good for Osborne to say ‘he believes in the free market, not a free ride’, but when it comes to substance he is found wanting.
The Tories try to imply that they want to support the vulnerable, with their promise that public servants earning less than £18,000 a year will be protected. But that will be met with mirth in Leeds, where bin men on an average salary of £18,000 are facing a pay cut from the Tory/Lib Dem council of £5,000 a year. It’s difficult to trust the Tories when what they say and what they do are so very different.
So much for the gimmicks. What about the meat? Yesterday’s spin suggested something pretty radical on the retirement age with talk of £13bn savings a year. But, the Tories are rapidly rolling back. Cameron started the u-turn on the Today programme – promising a ‘review’ (not a commitment) and suggesting that women would not be included – for now. The result, savings of £3bn (£10bn short of yesterday’s numbers), and a lot of uncertainty for people approaching retirement.
Apart from those who rely on the state pension (and of course, that is mainly lower income families) who else will be paying for the age of austerity that Cameron and Osborne talk about with such relish? Well, certainly not millionaires – Osborne repeated his commitment to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £2m for couples – a tax cut of £200,000 for the richest 3,000 estates. And, probably not even those in the top 1% of earnings. For while the Tories will stick with the new top rate of tax for those earning over £150,000 – although he didn’t commit to keep it for the life of the next parliament – they did not sign up to the other three tax raising measures announced by Labour in the Budget.
- They will NOT withdraw the personal allowance on income tax for those earning over £100,000 (worth £1.5bn a year);
- They will NOT address the anomaly which sees a quarter of all pensions tax relief going to the top 1.5% of savers (raising £3.1bn a year); and
- They have NOT signed up to the 0.5% increase in all rates of National Insurance Contributions (raising £3.35bn a year).
The banking crisis and recession will be used by the Tories to do what they always wanted to do. Cutting back the size of the state and then cutting taxes for the few. Osborne repeatedly insisted that ‘we are all in this together’, but that’s not how it seems to me and it’s not how it will be seen by the mainstream majority who the Tories still need to win over.