George Osborne should be a prisoner of his own failure. He made the wrong call in 2010, tightening fiscal policy just when the economy needed extra stimulus, and as a result he now has a stubborn deficit forecast stretching far into the future, with his deficit targets either rolling over or missed outright. He increased the tax burden on the many, reducing both the wellbeing and the spending power of British families while cutting tax for the super-well-off.

These were significantly bad choices.

Yet Osborne thinks the self-imposed shackles of past errors are easily unpicked. His gamble is that his economic errors – a stress on ‘stupid austerity’ rather than ‘smart fiscal conservatism’ – have counterintuitively given him the political capital to appear generous in this brief pre-election window, no matter that his deficit targets are slipping and our fiscal future looks bleak.

It is the paradox of failed thrift. Cut at the wrong time, making things worse, and a reputation for tight policy might be enough to avoid your responsibility for future deficits.

Osborne can therefore offer limited goodies to a hungry electorate now and call them a reward for his strategic grip, rather than a desperate, temporary improvisation only possible because the chancellor is a grateful bystander to a recovery driven by the flexibility, hard work, stoicism and entrepreneurship of the British people.

It is they he seeks to reward in the short term, even while the future tide of red ink means unpleasant tightening will soon undo any immediate relief he offers.

Of the goodies themselves, they can be divided into three parts.

First, some are welcome reforms. It is worthwhile to have a postgraduate loan scheme, further support for apprenticeships, a belated return to infrastructure spend, increased support for research and development. Each of these could have been introduced four years ago, of course, were it not for Osborne’s infatuation with austerity. But a worthwhile policy is better late than never.

The second group is blatantly electoral. The stamp duty threshold change is effectively a pay-off to owners of half a million houses paid for by the owners of two million pound houses. The fuel duty freeze is a present to drivers that will be balanced by tax rises and spending cuts after the election. These are policies designed to appeal to commuting voters in the marginals, a southern votegrab to go alongside the northern powerhouse.

The final part of the ‘long-term economic plan’ is almost comically cynical. We are still projecting budget cuts of unprecedented levels at a convenient post-election point, with non-ringfenced departments facing cuts of a third to a half.

The Downing Street assumption is simply that the opposition cannot point to Tory pain to come without also having to give voters an unpleasant preview of agonising Labour choices. His bet is that Labour is so afraid of having to say what must be done that we will not point out the difference between how we will do it and how the Tories would. It is in that gap that he hopes to convince the electorate of the unpleasant necessity of a Tory government.

What Osborne has done is use a reputation for austerity and restraint to allow him to avoid discussing the costs of his own failure. He is offering the electorate a few sweets now. Some of them are worthwhile choices of themselves. Others are low politics dressed as high principle.

However, there is a bill to be presented for his past mistakes. We will look back at this statement, if Osborne gets away with it, as the moment when the bills for past errors were quietly put in the chancellor’s back pocket, to be presented another day.

We must not, cannot, let him present that bill to the people who made his Houdini act possible today, the people who have worked and endured and grown the economy in spite of, not because of, this chancellor’s escapism.

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Hopi Sen is a contributing editor to Progress

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