George Osborne: like Fernando Torres, only less effective

While the Chancellor waffled on about how “we are all in this together”, it was announced that the Queen was receiving a 16 per cent boost to her Government grant and the likes of Torres will get a staggering tax break next year. That is a lot of "spare r

By Alex Andreou

I must admit some excitement as George Osborne declared “One of your company slogans is a very fitting catchphrase for what I want to talk about” to the assembled crowd of Morrisons employees. I was quite looking forward to discovering precisely how “STOP! Did you get the quiche?” related to our fiscal policy. Imagine my disappointment when the slogan in question turned out to be “Every Penny Matters”.

In a speech hailed by some as the Chancellor’s “man of the people” moment – presumably because he appeared to have gone to sleep Julie Andrews and woken up Dick Van Dyke – he proceeded to outline why his savage attack on the safety net that is our system of welfare was entirely justified. It says everything about this man, that welfare reforms which he resisted at the start of his tenure because of cost – so much so, that Iain Duncan Smith was rumoured to be on the verge of resignation – are now claimed as his own. What changed? They turned out to be quite popular.

According to Osborne, anyone who expresses concern about these reforms is guilty of spouting “ill-informed rubbish” and “shrill, headline-seeking nonsense”. This includes Crisis, Shelter, the National Housing Federation, the Children’s Society, Citizens Advice, Disability Rights UK, Mencap, Scope, the National Autistic Society, the Royal National Institute of Blind People, Disability Alliance and naturally, that shrill cesspit of communism, the Church of England.

“This month, nine out of ten working households will be better off as a result of the changes we are making.” At the risk of being shrill and ill-informed, what about last month? Or next month? What about non-working households, like pensioners? What about the tenth household in Osborne’s carefully chosen equation? How about some figures to support these claims? A head for detailed figures, terrifyingly, does not appear to be the Chancellor’s strong suit.

“In 2010 alone, payments to working age families cost £90bn,” he said. “That means that one in every six pounds of the tax that working people like you pay was going on working age benefits”, he continued. The written version of his speech circulated earlier, on the other hand, claimed that such payments “cost £75bn” and that this represented “one in every seven pounds”. These two versions are not even internally consistent. The first means that the relevant tax take in 2010 was £540bn (90×6). The second suggests it was £525bn (75×7). The man in charge of our economy is making up figures, give or take £15bn pounds. Let’s hope credit rating agencies were not watching too closely.

Not five minutes later, Osborne went on to mount an emotional defence of the reduction of the top rate of tax from 50p to 45p as “an economic essential”. “In a modern global economy,” he explained, “where people can move anywhere in the world, we cannot have a top rate of tax that discourages people from living here.” As always, it is when you take these arguments from the general to the specific, that their true nature is revealed.

Osborne watched Chelsea play Manchester United on Monday. He saw John Terry, Frank Lampard, Fernando Torres, Robin Van Persie, Wayne Rooney and Eden Hazard do their stuff. The combined wages of these six players are a staggering £1,035,000 per week. These six players – on their wages alone, never mind other sources of income – were handed a tax break of roughly £2.5m next year by the very Chancellor applauding them vacuously. That is roughly 110 teachers; it is roughly 120 nurses; it is roughly 15,000 “spare bedroom subsidies”.

And such premiership royalty are in very good company. While the Chancellor waffled on about how “we are all in this together”, it was announced that the Queen was receiving a 16 per cent boost to her Government grant. Not to sound unpatriotic, but being “in this together” would seem to imply we all have to make sacrifices. It is utterly obscene, at a time of economic stagnation during which the state is imposing untold misery on millions of those who can least afford it, for the person at the very top of the pile to be getting a £5m raise.

That is roughly 220 teachers; it is roughly 240 nurses; it is roughly 30,000 “spare bedroom subsidies” in exchange for the extra reward given to the council tenant with the most spare bedrooms in the country.

It seems, every one of my pennies matters; but not theirs. We’re in it, all right. Just not together.