It was a budget of bread and circuses, or booze and roller coasters. It was also a budget where George Osborne made his pitch to be the next leader of the Conservative party if David Cameron is ousted after the next election. There was money off beer and petrol, lots of opportunities for people to cash in their savings – and for rich parents to set up nice little earners for their children with the Help to Buy ISA. They will be cheering in the shires. There was assistance for North Sea oil, and a cut to corporation tax and some quick bucks made by selling off yet more assets.

But there was nothing about public services in the budget, nor any detail about how the Tories plan to make £12bn cuts to the welfare budget.

Indeed the Office for Budget Responsibility suggested that the cuts to the public sector – double the amount we have seen in the last government – make this a ‘roller coaster’ budget. Roller coaster, the report explains, because after an enormous 2016-17 and 2017-18 squeeze on public spending. The government intends to ease off again later towards the election, just when they have completely destroyed the public sector.

Where was the National Health Service and social care in all of this asked Ed Miliband? He might as well have asked about local government or defence. It was hard to tell exactly what would happen to any public services, there was no detail at all about where the massive cuts would fall, but it was clear that was of no importance at all to Osborne.

It is here that the middle classes, who in the end depend on public services, must smell a rat. There is now, as commentators pointed out, a £40bn gap between what Tories are going to cut and what Labour will cut. Labour also has the money to spend on infrastructure like housebuilding.

But the worst thing was how untrustworthy Osborne was today: take the annuities cash-in he proposed and then look at the small print. This is not for little old ladies to make a bit of money, this is a tax raising measure. Osborne reckons he can raise over £1bn from it for the Treasury.

Defence was not mentioned, nor the likelihood of massive cuts here. Instead it seems that Osborne thinks we can all be bought off if he does up a few RAF museums to commemorate the Battle of Britain and throws a big party for the anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt. This was nostalgic Britain rather than the ‘prosperous’ Britain or ‘comeback country’ that Osborne talked about.

It was though a highly political budget, a Westminster budget, designed to shoot Labour foxes. For all his rhetoric about the ‘whole nation’, it was clear this was what gave Osborne most pleasure.

Osborne had fiddled the figures so much that he was able to say that public spending would not now go down to 1930s levels but only to 2000 levels when Gordon Brown was chancellor. He also tried to equal Labour on the minimum wage saying the Tories would bring it up to more than £8 by 2020. As Miliband pointed out, the Tories promised it would be £7 an hour by now and it was still only going up by 20p an hour to £6.70 – so there is a promise that has not been kept.

There was much of the dodgy insurance salesman in Osborne’s offer. Selling off bank assets, supporting the carbon economy, offering short term deals on savings which turn out to be windfalls for the Treasury. As ever with him, you are likely to be missold.

Miliband is right to attack the Tories’ on trustworthiness as he continued to do today. There is one thing that you can be sure of after the smoke has cleared: the prosperous society George Osborne offered today will only be for the very few. There is not going to be many public services left for you and me.

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Sally Gimson is a journalist and Labour councillor in the London borough of Camden. She tweets @SallyGimson