The budget that ignored those looking for work

Osborne started by saying that his Budget supports working families and those looking for work – which was the last time those not in work were mentioned. The sole giveaway for ‘the poor’ in this Budget was the increased personal tax allowance, which does zilch for those already too poor to pay it.

With an extra £10bn in welfare cuts planned – hot on the heels of the Welfare Reform Act – the only people who will see any increased benefits are the armed forces families. Meanwhile the pensioners will be hardest hit, with a tax ‘simplification’ that amounts in reality to a £1bn cut. You can’t help but wonder whether the planned individual tax statements will break down just how much of the ‘welfare’ bill is spent on pensions.

Clegg looked like he was waiting for Robin Hood to come and rescue him – all he got from this budget was a few extra trains to Sheffield, through Northern Hub. Channel 4’s Faisal Islam suggested on Twitter that this investment represented a ‘Tory push into Manchester’, at which I laughed until I choked on a crisp.

As Ed Balls muttered during the speech, Osborne’s problem is that no-one believes a word he says – with good reason, as Ed Miliband illustrated in his storming response. Not only is growth rising to 0.8% rather than Osborne’s forecasted 2.5%, but the Eds had dug up a few more claims from previous budgets, including embarrassing figures on the failure of the National Insurance holiday.

I’d feared a standard-issue response from EdM, but although there was some of the usual middle-squeezery, he was strong on number-crunching some of the Budget policies – eg 99% of those who will benefit from the top-rate tax cut will be unaffected by the rise in stamp duty – and won praise on Twitter, including from some of his usual critics, for the strong message about the end of ‘all in this together’.

The attempts to get the coalition front bench to own up to benefiting from the tax cut maybe went on a bit too long. But his summary of Osborne’s guiding principle as ‘The poor will only work harder by making them poorer, the rich will only work harder by making them richer’ resonates pretty damn well.