George Osborne maxed out his political credit card today with a benefits bonanza for bosses and a middle class housing hand-out all to be paid for by unspecified cuts in 2015.
A range of measures, including corporation tax cuts (Osborne’s dad will be pleased) and Fannie Mae style mortgages for people wanting to upgrade to £600,000 mansions, will no doubt buy Osborne a few headlines. But he will pay in 2015 when yet more savage cuts – including no doubt more social security slashing – plunge even more people into desperate poverty.
Of course when it comes to public sector workers (currently on strike today – solidarity and all that you benefit sanctioning bastards), Osborne couldn’t wait to wield the axe. Low paid public sector workers will now face a triple whammy of extended wage freezes along with the already announced real term cuts to tax credits and housing benefit.
For those workers, and the millions other who are set to see in work benefits raided on a yearly basis, the raising of the personal allowance will be of little comfort.
Osborne ploughed ahead with his plans to create mass homelessness by extending the Right To Buy scheme, meaning less homes for those with least. Still not to worry now that Jemima and Tarquin can upgrade their property investment using a government sponsored loan instead of dipping into the latte-slurping fund.
And for the rest of us, all we got was a trivial cut in the price of beer that the breweries probably won’t bother to pass on. Let them get pissed is Osborne’s response to the crisis. And obviously this cut only applies to beer, not wine or spirits, because beer’s what the plebs drink. A more transparent attempt to neutralise last year’s pasty tax shambles would be hard to imagine.
Once again there is nothing in this budget for the very poorest. The bosses on the other hand will be laughing all the way to the bank.
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