Well Played Gideon, Well Played

Hopes that people will fall for it, rather.  And no doubt...they will.

George Osborne sought to outflank Labour and soften the blow from a £12bn cut to Britain’s welfare bill when he made a big rise in the minimum wage the centrepiece of the first Conservative budget in almost two decades.

In a move that went further than Labour was planning at the general election, the chancellor said employers would be forced to pay staff a minimum of £7.20 an hour from next April and raise wages by 6% a year on average to around £9 an hour by the end of the parliament.

And oh how the right-wing press would have savaged Labour for going through with even a £8 minimum'living wage' as anti-business radical extremists.

Relishing the freedom to deliver his latest budget unfettered by coalition, the chancellor eased up on the pace of deficit reduction and reduced the size of the cuts that Whitehall departments will face in the coming years.

What, suddenly, reducing the deficit isn't so critical any more ?  But still going to do your damnedest to defund and destroy the BBC, aren't you ?

On the assumption that the economy grows steadily at around 2.5% a year, the Treasury is now expecting a £10bn surplus in the final year of the parliament – a sizeable war chest for the 2020 election. The improvement in public finances will come partly through a tougher tax regime for buy-to-let landlords, restricting non-dom tax status and by increased dividend taxation.

'Non-dom', 'non-dom'...Sounds familiar.  Wasn't there some politician banging on about that in the last election ?

Declaring “Britain needs a pay rise” – once the campaign slogan of the TUC – Osborne said he was directly boosting the national minimum wage of 2.7 million workers aged over 25. The increase, accompanied by substantial welfare cuts over three years, was designed to engineer a rebalancing between the individual and the state – a political intervention to shift responsibility for low incomes from the state to employers.

...

The announcement was greeted by the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, punching the air in triumph, but the shadow chancellor, Chris Leslie, said: “This minimum wage increase is just a rebrand of the minimum wage – trying to call it something different. It doesn’t actually compensate in any way for this massive take away from tax credits. The changes amount to a work penalty that he has introduced into the tax credit system. It hit very, very hard.”

The whole thing was brilliantly well-played, really*.  Theresa and Boris will no doubt be standing beside him in the wings with knives out come 2020-ish, but underestimate this man at your peril.  As a ruthless politician that is.  As an economist or as a human, he's shit.


* Well, other than Iain Duncan Smith's buffoonery.