The lucky chancellor, and the hopeless opposition.
Some say you make your own luck. Football managers often claim that any refereeing decisions that wrongly go in their favour average out over a season. Others still will claim that when you're on a downward trajectory anyway, fate tends to intervene all the more.
Then there are those who are just plain lucky. George Osborne is such a person. Whenever he's found himself in a hole, someone or something has always heard his pleas and prayers for help and came along to pull him out. It would be remiss to not admit that some of his luck is of his own making, as whenever he has done something stupid he's recognised his mistake, whether it was the litany of errors in the omnishambles budget, or today with tax credits. As the autumn statement and spending review demonstrates, the usual wisdom that making a full 180 always damages a politician is wrong, so long as the reversal is made early enough and is a total one.
Had the Office for Budget Responsibility not of course discovered there was £27bn down the back of the Treasury settee, Osborne would have been in complete stuck. As well as upping its forecasts as to what income and corporation tax will bring in, a mammoth 2/3rds of the £27bn "windfall" comes from the OBR altering its tax modelling. While there is nothing to suggest this wasn't solely the doing of the OBR, it does bear mentioning that the OBR figures are based on government finances up till the end of September, and not the ones from October that showed a large year-on-year rise in borrowing. Whether they would have changed the OBR's working substantially or not is less important than how it demonstrates once again Osborne's good fortune. He is the lucky chancellor.
Eventually though your luck must run out. Whether that happens before Cameron exits Number 10, or it happens once Osborne moves next door, as is increasingly odds on, it will happen. You can't go on acting with as such arrogance as Osborne did on tax credits, believing that no one would cotton on to how he was shafting the very people the Tories claimed to help and keep getting away with it. You can't keep insisting on cuts to unprotected government departments that in the case of the Department of Transport will amount to 75% by the end of the decade, or an even more eye-watering 77% in the case of local government, without something breaking, and breaking irrevocably. You can't have such luck as to get a £27bn windfall, and then still preach of the absolute necessity of running a surplus of £10bn by the time of the next election.
For now at least Osborne can sit back and enjoy for the umpteenth time paeans not just from the Tory press but the majority of the media. How does he keep doing it they wonder? Much of the answer is in how, as Aditya Chakrabortty points out, we've fallen for the same trick each time. The Tories brief of how drastic and severe their cuts are, how tough it's going to be, then turns up George to tell us it's not going to be so bad after all. Since the autumn statement last year each time Osborne has stood at the dispatch box, the Commons listening rapt, he's reduced the amount needing to be cut. He's done it in different ways, whether through today's mixture of windfall and tax rises, to go with the tax rises he'd already announced back in July, but achieved it he has. The amount of departmental cuts has now been reduced overall to a "mere" £10bn, and with the police also now protected, from fewer sources.
The usual budget day/autumn statement smoke and mirrors have naturally been turned to also. The tax credit U-turn isn't a true one as Osborne has not abandoned his £12bn of welfare cuts; instead universal credit has been raided again before it properly rolls out, if it ever does such have been the problems associated with it. Hidden within the wider good news is that the OBR revised downwards its forecast for both household disposable income and average earnings, making clear that the tepid growth of the last few years is here to stay. The increases in the money for social care and for the police are also dependent on councils introducing precepts on both through council tax, which as Jo Maugham points out is highly regressive.
Once that mist has cleared, the Tories' priorities will be as clear as ever. There was money showered on housing, but only on housing to buy; as for those who want to rent or won't ever be able to afford to buy, their options will dwindle further with the extension of right to buy to housing associations. The 3% surcharge on stamp duty for second homes or those buying to let is welcome in the case of the former, but will almost certainly lead only to further increases in rent on the latter. Post-2012 students will find the threshold at which they start paying back their loans has been frozen in spite of a consultation. With the state pension increasing by £3.35 a week while other benefits will be frozen in line with inflation, it will once again be those most likely to vote who gain most. As government spending heads south to 36.5% of GDP by 2020, 42% of that spending will be on either health or older people. Of all the spending described as unsustainable in the past few years, surely that level on one department and one part of the population will prove to be so before much longer.
Osborne's plans at heart remain a huge gamble. If it turns out the OBR has got its revenue forecasts wrong (again) then he has little room for manoeuvre, unless he makes the ultimate U-turn and cuts back on his dream surplus. He could ask for further departmental cuts, but from where? He could make further welfare cuts, but it's not even clear where the £12bn is going to come from now that tax credits are protected. He's raised taxes on every area possible other than on income, national insurance and VAT, which the government plans to make illegal, it's worth remembering. He could put corporation tax back up, but that would be a further U-turn and would anger business, already quietly seething both about the "national living wage" and now the new apprentice levy, or as the Tories would describe it were they in opposition, a jobs tax.
Sad as it is to say, a proper opposition would be pointing all of this out. A proper opposition would have made as much as it could, not just out of the tax credits U-turn, but also how it means Osborne has fallen into the very welfare trap he laid for Labour, breaching the cap he foolishly legislated for. A proper opposition would be asking where the £12bn in cuts to welfare will now be coming from, as the answer can only be through taking an axe to housing benefits, cutting employment and support allowance or hacking even further at JSA. A proper opposition would while emphasising Osborne's miserable failure to clear the deficit in a single parliament also be setting out what it would be doing differently.
What the opposition cannot keep doing is providing gifts to the government like John McDonnell quoting from Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, regardless of his point or it being a joke. No wonder the Labour benches looked so grim as he threw it across the Commons; no wonder George Osborne looked as though all his Christmases had come at once. You can point the finger at the media and the anti-Corbyn majority in the PLP all you like, as I have and will keep doing; there's no getting away from how the real joke at the moment is the Labour (non)-leadership and its failure to do so much as the bare minimum.
Osborne will finish up laughing on the other side of his face. When that will be when the opposition is so hopeless and the wider media so in awe of an opportunistic and lucky but otherwise mediocre chancellor remains to be seen.
Then there are those who are just plain lucky. George Osborne is such a person. Whenever he's found himself in a hole, someone or something has always heard his pleas and prayers for help and came along to pull him out. It would be remiss to not admit that some of his luck is of his own making, as whenever he has done something stupid he's recognised his mistake, whether it was the litany of errors in the omnishambles budget, or today with tax credits. As the autumn statement and spending review demonstrates, the usual wisdom that making a full 180 always damages a politician is wrong, so long as the reversal is made early enough and is a total one.
Had the Office for Budget Responsibility not of course discovered there was £27bn down the back of the Treasury settee, Osborne would have been in complete stuck. As well as upping its forecasts as to what income and corporation tax will bring in, a mammoth 2/3rds of the £27bn "windfall" comes from the OBR altering its tax modelling. While there is nothing to suggest this wasn't solely the doing of the OBR, it does bear mentioning that the OBR figures are based on government finances up till the end of September, and not the ones from October that showed a large year-on-year rise in borrowing. Whether they would have changed the OBR's working substantially or not is less important than how it demonstrates once again Osborne's good fortune. He is the lucky chancellor.
Eventually though your luck must run out. Whether that happens before Cameron exits Number 10, or it happens once Osborne moves next door, as is increasingly odds on, it will happen. You can't go on acting with as such arrogance as Osborne did on tax credits, believing that no one would cotton on to how he was shafting the very people the Tories claimed to help and keep getting away with it. You can't keep insisting on cuts to unprotected government departments that in the case of the Department of Transport will amount to 75% by the end of the decade, or an even more eye-watering 77% in the case of local government, without something breaking, and breaking irrevocably. You can't have such luck as to get a £27bn windfall, and then still preach of the absolute necessity of running a surplus of £10bn by the time of the next election.
For now at least Osborne can sit back and enjoy for the umpteenth time paeans not just from the Tory press but the majority of the media. How does he keep doing it they wonder? Much of the answer is in how, as Aditya Chakrabortty points out, we've fallen for the same trick each time. The Tories brief of how drastic and severe their cuts are, how tough it's going to be, then turns up George to tell us it's not going to be so bad after all. Since the autumn statement last year each time Osborne has stood at the dispatch box, the Commons listening rapt, he's reduced the amount needing to be cut. He's done it in different ways, whether through today's mixture of windfall and tax rises, to go with the tax rises he'd already announced back in July, but achieved it he has. The amount of departmental cuts has now been reduced overall to a "mere" £10bn, and with the police also now protected, from fewer sources.
The usual budget day/autumn statement smoke and mirrors have naturally been turned to also. The tax credit U-turn isn't a true one as Osborne has not abandoned his £12bn of welfare cuts; instead universal credit has been raided again before it properly rolls out, if it ever does such have been the problems associated with it. Hidden within the wider good news is that the OBR revised downwards its forecast for both household disposable income and average earnings, making clear that the tepid growth of the last few years is here to stay. The increases in the money for social care and for the police are also dependent on councils introducing precepts on both through council tax, which as Jo Maugham points out is highly regressive.
Once that mist has cleared, the Tories' priorities will be as clear as ever. There was money showered on housing, but only on housing to buy; as for those who want to rent or won't ever be able to afford to buy, their options will dwindle further with the extension of right to buy to housing associations. The 3% surcharge on stamp duty for second homes or those buying to let is welcome in the case of the former, but will almost certainly lead only to further increases in rent on the latter. Post-2012 students will find the threshold at which they start paying back their loans has been frozen in spite of a consultation. With the state pension increasing by £3.35 a week while other benefits will be frozen in line with inflation, it will once again be those most likely to vote who gain most. As government spending heads south to 36.5% of GDP by 2020, 42% of that spending will be on either health or older people. Of all the spending described as unsustainable in the past few years, surely that level on one department and one part of the population will prove to be so before much longer.
Osborne's plans at heart remain a huge gamble. If it turns out the OBR has got its revenue forecasts wrong (again) then he has little room for manoeuvre, unless he makes the ultimate U-turn and cuts back on his dream surplus. He could ask for further departmental cuts, but from where? He could make further welfare cuts, but it's not even clear where the £12bn is going to come from now that tax credits are protected. He's raised taxes on every area possible other than on income, national insurance and VAT, which the government plans to make illegal, it's worth remembering. He could put corporation tax back up, but that would be a further U-turn and would anger business, already quietly seething both about the "national living wage" and now the new apprentice levy, or as the Tories would describe it were they in opposition, a jobs tax.
Sad as it is to say, a proper opposition would be pointing all of this out. A proper opposition would have made as much as it could, not just out of the tax credits U-turn, but also how it means Osborne has fallen into the very welfare trap he laid for Labour, breaching the cap he foolishly legislated for. A proper opposition would be asking where the £12bn in cuts to welfare will now be coming from, as the answer can only be through taking an axe to housing benefits, cutting employment and support allowance or hacking even further at JSA. A proper opposition would while emphasising Osborne's miserable failure to clear the deficit in a single parliament also be setting out what it would be doing differently.
What the opposition cannot keep doing is providing gifts to the government like John McDonnell quoting from Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, regardless of his point or it being a joke. No wonder the Labour benches looked so grim as he threw it across the Commons; no wonder George Osborne looked as though all his Christmases had come at once. You can point the finger at the media and the anti-Corbyn majority in the PLP all you like, as I have and will keep doing; there's no getting away from how the real joke at the moment is the Labour (non)-leadership and its failure to do so much as the bare minimum.
Osborne will finish up laughing on the other side of his face. When that will be when the opposition is so hopeless and the wider media so in awe of an opportunistic and lucky but otherwise mediocre chancellor remains to be seen.
Labels: autumn statement, Conservatives, economics, George Osborne, Labour, politics, spending review, tax credits
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It was stunningly misjudged bit of theater from McDonnell - made worse by the fact that now he'll only be answering questions about that all day rather than making points about the Autumn statement. On the other hand, at least he didn't get out flanked on the left as would have probably happened with some of the other candidates.
Osborne and Cameron continue to be the embodiment of the anti-properterian argument; they're where they are not by intelligence, or skill, or hard work but merely because they're lucky. To extend the sports metaphor you make - politics shares a similar feature in that momentum matters. When the momentum is with you everything just seems to go right; when it's against everything compounds into errors.
I just hope the momentum swings against Osborne sooner rather than later or Christ my young adult life is going to be bleak..
Posted by
Will |
Thursday, November 26, 2015 10:31:00 am
They do have skill, we shouldn't ignore that; it is hard to be as polished and shiny as Cameron is, and when his natural arrogance and hubris doesn't get the better of him Osborne knows what he's doing all too well. But yes, they have been extraordinarily lucky, especially in how desperate an opposition they're facing. I've been pining for the good old days of Miliband of late, it's been that disheartening.
Posted by
septicisle |
Thursday, November 26, 2015 9:54:00 pm
I'd grudgingly admit that there is some skill in presentation and such in there; however it only works when the press are on side and he's struggled when he's on the wrong side of the news agenda.
Milliband gets a bad rap, but I thought he was very good as an opposition leader. He certainly managed to dictate the agenda more so than the government it seemed. He was just undone by his own timidity, ultimately, and the desire to keep all the party on side.
Posted by
Will |
Friday, November 27, 2015 5:14:00 pm
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