Nick Cohen
by Nick Cohen
George Osborne spoke last Monday before an audience that must have taken his aides weeks to find: Workers and managers of a manufacturing firm, which had ignored Britain’s £9.4bn trade deficit and succeeded in becoming a thriving exporter of car components.
He had “never promised it was going to be easy”. He had always said there would be “difficult sacrifices”. The pain was not over or half over and 2014 would be “the year of hard truths”. Harshness was he could promise until 2017 and perhaps beyond. The years to come would bring more cuts of £12bn to welfare and £13bn to local government and centrally administered services. “There are no easy options here,” he warned. Voters must not believe the false promises of other politicians. His hard way was the only way “to fix our country’s problems”.
The Churchillian language of offering nothing but blood, toil, tears and sweat, implies that you and your supporters make sacrifices.
In Osborne’s Britain, tears are always in other people’s eyes. None of his hard choices threatens the economic interests of most of the Conservative party’s supporters. There’s no hit on inheritance and capital gains of the comfortable; little will to ensure corporations pay more taxes; and no blows to the rentier class that exploits our housing shortage. Through his double standards, we are learning much about Britain’s future and Osborne.
His admirers say he is the best political pro in Westminster. He controls who goes up and goes down in the Tory party. Almost every right-wing commentator in the Tory press bends the knee and parrots his briefings.
So great is his influence at the Times, where Conservative party activists police the Comment section, that the newspaper named Osborne “2013 Briton of the year”. He was the man who will dominate “the whole of this parliament”, the paper argued, and by extension, the whole of Britain.
And like a true political pro, he uses his power to pursue the Conservatives’ narrow interest rather than the national interest, during a period of rolling economic and constitutional crises.
At least a few of his cabinet colleagues find his obsessiveness frightening. Cameron had a human face. He may be tetchy and rude in private, but if he saw that a government policy was causing avoidable harm, there was a faint chance he would change it. Iain Duncan Smith had a Christian conscience and did not like seeing suffering.
But Osborne was like a computer programme. You couldn’t appeal to his better nature, or any notion of the public good. He thinks: If a policy plays well and it is good for the Tories, you just go ahead and do it.
The results of his cynicism are all around us. We can see the housing bubble he is pumping with taxpayers’ money and with the disgraceful acquiescence of his well-paid appointee, Mark Carney, the “independent” Governor of Bank of England. Homeowners are watching the value of their assets rise and Osborne hopes they will be grateful on election day. Who cares if young people and young families face inflated rents and prices? They are not his problem.
Osborne will not insist that the rich, the tax dodging and the old make sacrifices, because they are likely to vote for Conservative. The choice to excuse them from meeting the additional costs of a national debt heading towards £1.5trn isn’t a “hard choice” for Osborne but no choice at all. They must be spared. He demands sacrifices from the poor, a section of the struggling working and lower middle classes and from the young, who are having to cope with a society without precedent.
In 2009, Britain made a momentous transition. The Office for National Statistics reported the 24.5 million 16- to 44-year-olds had been overtaken by the 25.7 million aged 45 and above. We had become a land of the old. The political consequences of the transformation would be big enough. But they are accentuated by disparities between the willingness of different age groups to vote.
A brave politician, a speaker of “hard truths”, would tell older voters that the young weren’t their enemies but their children and grandchildren. He would say that a country that neglected its youth was neglecting its future and would soon become a sluggish backwater, suspicious of change and without the ability to compete in the modern world. Osborne is doing nothing of the sort.
Osborne’s “hard choice” of cutting welfare even further by 2017 needs to be put in context. Half the £200bn welfare budget goes on pensioners. Spending on pensions will be ringfenced, as will spending on NHS, which we depend on more the older we get. All the further £12bn cuts in welfare Osborne envisages will come from the £100bn spent on the working-age poor – including the poor who work and their children.
According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies Osborne could embrace the Liberal Democrats’ idea of a mansion tax on the fabulously expensive homes foreign and native oligarchs are buying in the southeast.
He could end anomalies in inheritance and capital gains, the institute said, and make wealthy parents pay tax on the gifts to their children. Can you imagine Osborne taking that hard choice? Can you hear him saying he wants higher inheritance taxes because he believes Britain should be a meritocracy rather than a plutocracy?
Osborne says he wants international agreement to make corporations pay more. His assertions are provably false, replies Richard Brooks, a tax inspector, who was so ashamed of working for a Revenue that cut sweetheart deals for multinationals he resigned to become Private Eye’s star reporter.
One of his first acts in government was to cut British multinationals’ tax bills by at least £7bn by granting them exemptions when they moved money into tax havens. “Nobody in the private sector could believe what [Osborne] did,” Brooks quotes a city account as saying in his book The Great Tax Robbery. “It was just so stupid.” The Guardian
by Nick Cohen
George Osborne spoke last Monday before an audience that must have taken his aides weeks to find: Workers and managers of a manufacturing firm, which had ignored Britain’s £9.4bn trade deficit and succeeded in becoming a thriving exporter of car components.
He had “never promised it was going to be easy”. He had always said there would be “difficult sacrifices”. The pain was not over or half over and 2014 would be “the year of hard truths”. Harshness was he could promise until 2017 and perhaps beyond. The years to come would bring more cuts of £12bn to welfare and £13bn to local government and centrally administered services. “There are no easy options here,” he warned. Voters must not believe the false promises of other politicians. His hard way was the only way “to fix our country’s problems”.
The Churchillian language of offering nothing but blood, toil, tears and sweat, implies that you and your supporters make sacrifices.
In Osborne’s Britain, tears are always in other people’s eyes. None of his hard choices threatens the economic interests of most of the Conservative party’s supporters. There’s no hit on inheritance and capital gains of the comfortable; little will to ensure corporations pay more taxes; and no blows to the rentier class that exploits our housing shortage. Through his double standards, we are learning much about Britain’s future and Osborne.
His admirers say he is the best political pro in Westminster. He controls who goes up and goes down in the Tory party. Almost every right-wing commentator in the Tory press bends the knee and parrots his briefings.
So great is his influence at the Times, where Conservative party activists police the Comment section, that the newspaper named Osborne “2013 Briton of the year”. He was the man who will dominate “the whole of this parliament”, the paper argued, and by extension, the whole of Britain.
And like a true political pro, he uses his power to pursue the Conservatives’ narrow interest rather than the national interest, during a period of rolling economic and constitutional crises.
At least a few of his cabinet colleagues find his obsessiveness frightening. Cameron had a human face. He may be tetchy and rude in private, but if he saw that a government policy was causing avoidable harm, there was a faint chance he would change it. Iain Duncan Smith had a Christian conscience and did not like seeing suffering.
But Osborne was like a computer programme. You couldn’t appeal to his better nature, or any notion of the public good. He thinks: If a policy plays well and it is good for the Tories, you just go ahead and do it.
The results of his cynicism are all around us. We can see the housing bubble he is pumping with taxpayers’ money and with the disgraceful acquiescence of his well-paid appointee, Mark Carney, the “independent” Governor of Bank of England. Homeowners are watching the value of their assets rise and Osborne hopes they will be grateful on election day. Who cares if young people and young families face inflated rents and prices? They are not his problem.
Osborne will not insist that the rich, the tax dodging and the old make sacrifices, because they are likely to vote for Conservative. The choice to excuse them from meeting the additional costs of a national debt heading towards £1.5trn isn’t a “hard choice” for Osborne but no choice at all. They must be spared. He demands sacrifices from the poor, a section of the struggling working and lower middle classes and from the young, who are having to cope with a society without precedent.
In 2009, Britain made a momentous transition. The Office for National Statistics reported the 24.5 million 16- to 44-year-olds had been overtaken by the 25.7 million aged 45 and above. We had become a land of the old. The political consequences of the transformation would be big enough. But they are accentuated by disparities between the willingness of different age groups to vote.
A brave politician, a speaker of “hard truths”, would tell older voters that the young weren’t their enemies but their children and grandchildren. He would say that a country that neglected its youth was neglecting its future and would soon become a sluggish backwater, suspicious of change and without the ability to compete in the modern world. Osborne is doing nothing of the sort.
Osborne’s “hard choice” of cutting welfare even further by 2017 needs to be put in context. Half the £200bn welfare budget goes on pensioners. Spending on pensions will be ringfenced, as will spending on NHS, which we depend on more the older we get. All the further £12bn cuts in welfare Osborne envisages will come from the £100bn spent on the working-age poor – including the poor who work and their children.
According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies Osborne could embrace the Liberal Democrats’ idea of a mansion tax on the fabulously expensive homes foreign and native oligarchs are buying in the southeast.
He could end anomalies in inheritance and capital gains, the institute said, and make wealthy parents pay tax on the gifts to their children. Can you imagine Osborne taking that hard choice? Can you hear him saying he wants higher inheritance taxes because he believes Britain should be a meritocracy rather than a plutocracy?
Osborne says he wants international agreement to make corporations pay more. His assertions are provably false, replies Richard Brooks, a tax inspector, who was so ashamed of working for a Revenue that cut sweetheart deals for multinationals he resigned to become Private Eye’s star reporter.
One of his first acts in government was to cut British multinationals’ tax bills by at least £7bn by granting them exemptions when they moved money into tax havens. “Nobody in the private sector could believe what [Osborne] did,” Brooks quotes a city account as saying in his book The Great Tax Robbery. “It was just so stupid.” The Guardian
