Osborne’s budget bottom line pumps up the party

It is regarded as the toughest gig in politics.

After the Chancellor has delivered his budget the Leader of the Opposition has to get up and pan it, despite only just having heard it.

Even when it’s a rubbish budget that’s hard.

It wasn’t Ed Miliband who coined phrases like “granny tax” and “pasty tax” after George Osborne’s infamous omnishambles budget of 2012.

He just thrashed around and trashed it in a more general way.

Meanwhile just outside the chamber it was the press picking holes and unravelling that particularly poor statement.

And last week’s budget wasn’t rubbish, making Harriet Harman’s task all the trickier.

Like so many folk at this time of year Hattie can see the finishing line and she’s running out of steam. But while most of us are waiting for holidays to begin Harman gets to give up leading Labour for good in September.

She’s a good speaker, a noble politician and a surprisingly fun person to be around despite her politically correct Harriet Harperson persona but Labour’s interim leader really is going through the motions at the moment. It’s not just that she stumbles over her words but some of the fire has gone out of her, she knows it’s someone anyone else’s turn to take on David Cameron and the sooner that happens the better.

However, it’s hard to see how any of the Labour contenders could’ve responded to Osborne’s emergency budget any better.

He had apparently stolen the clothes from their backs.

When Labour announced during the election campaign that they would abolish non-doms folk who live here but don’t pay tax here it was the only point at which the Conservative campaign seriously wobbled. So Osborne stole the policy and scrapped non-doms himself last Wednesday.

His so-called “super rabbit” plucked from the Budget box was the announcement of a new living wage, set to hit £9 per hour by 2020.

Labour didn’t adopt this one during the election campaign for if they had they’d have been derided as economically illiterate and imperilling employment.

They wanted to raise the minimum wage but not as far.

Osborne’s announcement was met by a combination of awe at his audacity, curiosity as to why he didn’t make it in the manifesto, and pump- ing fists from Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith.

Within 24 hours however it began to become clear why the new living wage hadn’t been exposed to the full scrutiny of an election campaign.

It was one of the Chancellor’s classic too-clever-by-half tricks.

He had in fact raised the minimum wage by a little bit more than was planned. But not for those under 25.

Business didn’t like being told how much to pay people. People didn’t like what looked like a linguistic sleight of hand.

And soon the economists worked out that this pay rise for the low paid would not offset what they are going to lose in benefits.

The Chancellor is slashing tax credits to the bone and, in a slightly concerning act of social engineering, restricting child benefit to the first two children.

Those measures might have left Labour something to get their teeth into, if they weren’t so badly burned by the election defeat blamed on concentrating too hard on those at the fringes of society rather than the broad middle ground.

The budget bottom line is that most people will be better off thanks to higher tax thresholds.

The SNP, as third party, got to have a go at George Osborne too but Stewart Hosie’s attack fell only slightly less flat than Harman’s.

He observed of the Chancellor: “He is not a stupid man.”

After delivering a budget that had the press and his party purring and the opposition on the floor it didn’t really need saying.