The Chancellor's autumn statement was a disgrace - the slimy bribe to pensioners, the refusal to start de-welfaring Britain by reforming Labour's ghastly dependency-creating tax credit system (which basically boils down to middle class tax-payers subsidising cheap labour for business), the sleight-of-hand taxing of the first generation of graduates to pay £9000 tuition fees by freezing the £21,000 income level at which have to start repaying their loans (instead of allowing the figure to rise in line with inflation - how petty!), the inexplicable U-turn on cutting police funding (which I'm not against in principle - unlike this Tory government, it seems), yet more money for foreign aid (just - why?), the failure to use any of the £27Bn OBR "windfall" (which will turn out to be a miscalculation in any case) to get on with paying off our humungous debt - and all the rest. This was a budget Gordon Brown could have produced: it's hard to think of a worse insult.
Of course, George Osborne got away with it because there is currently no functioning parliamentary opposition - just a gaggle of pathetic, dim-witted, under-educated, economically illiterate, terrorism-supporting old commies who hate their country and want to see it reduced to the status of Albania as soon as possible. If Osborne doesn't have the guts (or, apparently, the desire) to produce a proper right-wing budget now, with four-and-a-half years to go before the next election, with Labour in utter disarray and without any creepy LibDem partners to appease, we can be certain that he never will.
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