Gaby Hinsliff: Osborne sounded like a man outlining his legacy





Forget the sugar tax, sweet as it is for middle-class mothers who disapprove of fizzy drinks. Forget the nostalgic Thatcherite stuff about helping corner shops and plucky small businesses battling Amazon, even the tax cut at the end. The bit of this budget that mattered most to George Osborne was the doom-laden stuff at the beginning about how the world economy may be about to go horribly wrong.

If there’s another recession, then the chancellor can kiss goodbye not just to his cherished surplus but to his chances of ever succeeding David Cameron as leader. His reputation couldn’t survive a second crash.

This budget felt strangely like a pre-election one, aimed at suburban swing voters – they’ll love the cheap petrol and after-school sports clubs in Nuneaton – perhaps because it is. Once the EU referendum is over Tory MPs will move on to pondering the succession, with the most restless predicting a handover as early as 2018 to give the new leader time to settle in. So Osborne made his pitch – a vision of a small-state, low tax Britain that rewards work and has nothing much to say to those out of it – with brisk clarity.

There was an odd moment when, introducing the sugar tax, he said he would never forgive himself for not doing something about childhood obesity while he could. It was as prime ministerial as he has ever allowed himself to sound. But there was no warmth in the reception from Tory backbenchers, merely cool respect for the way he ticks electoral boxes. Unwittingly or not, Osborne sounded more like a man outlining his legacy than one who feels his time coming.

Aditya Chakrabortty: The chancellor continued shovelling money at the well-off

Ignore the usual staginess. Look at the fundamentals: growth down, borrowing up, more cuts. Whichever way you look at it, this was a bad day at the office for George Osborne.

He brave-faced the fact that he will break his own targets on debt and welfare spending and did his utmost to sprinkle around what little money he could – splashing around small Treasury giveaways on cathedrals and sports lessons and sprinkling cash in Faslane and Teeside and East Anglia – but it was thin stuff.

What should really concern us is the vision of Britain 2020 laid out this afternoon: our economy more shrunken, our wages far reduced (a consequence of the lower productivity now forecast) and hit by a fresh wave of spending cuts and tax rises. Just how big those cuts and tax rises have to be is almost certainly going to be picked apart by the Institute for Fiscal Studies tomorrow: the Treasury appears to have picked 2019 as the year in which it starts a huge fiscal retrenchment. What glorious timing! Osborne is going to do all of this months before an election, and just as David Cameron is handing over the reins of the Tory party to its new leader.

With barely any room for giveaways, the chancellor continued shovelling money at the well-off: raising the threshold for 40% income tax, cutting capital gains for the private-equity boys and girls. A bedroom tax for the poor who have a spare room, but a tax cut for the middle classes renting out a room on Airbnb. Even the Isa for the young that Osborne announced with such fanfare can only be fully enjoyed by those with rich parents.

Anne Perkins: Having been impoverished, councils will also lose control of schools





It felt like watching a bloke on the pavement with an upturned milk crate doing the three card trick. The sunlit uplands of the chancellor’s opening patter, then the welter of tax changes and then, ultimate distraction, the great big sugar bunny: the government capitulation to the case argued by almost everyone concerned with public health – a tax on sugary drinks.

We know that we all eat too much sugar. How to deter it, though, is more contentious. Only a few months ago the government was insisting that the impact of a tax on sugary drinks, the source of nearly a third of the sugar intake of primary-age children, remained unproven (just like its earlier resistance to plain cigarette packaging). Now it’s introducing a tax predicted to raise £500m, which in a wonderful virtuous circle will be diverted to supporting sport in schools, breakfast clubs and after-school care. Jamie Oliver, 1. Sugar lobby, 0.

But hang on: it’s not coming in until 2018, so drinks manufacturers have the time to reformulate their products. If they do so successfully, the tax won’t raise the predicted cash. Who then pays for the services the government now recognises are so badly needed?

At the same time, local government is being starved of sources of income: business rates, on which the new devolved funding model that will see councils raising all their budgets from their own residents regardless of need or capacity to pay, are being cut. There is no news yet of any kind of redistribution or rate support scheme that used to make sure poorer councils remain able to provide essential services.

And having been impoverished, councils will also lose control of schools as every primary and secondary is forced to become an academy funded directly from the Department for Education. But from Liverpool to East Anglia, they will have directly elected mayors, Osborne announced. Where did that ace of spades come from?

Polly Toynbee: A short-term budget to save face on the EU referendum

Photograph: The Guardian

Long-term economic plan? This was the most short-term budget in living memory because only one thing matters now – staying inside the EU. All these Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts are predicated on remaining, not on a decade of bitter Brexit negotiations. Not even the worst of Osborne’s budgets so far could deliver the hammer blow to the country’s long-term future that would be inflicted by a vote to leave.

So, despite the haemorrhage of funds the Treasury had expected to flow in, this had to be a feel-good, hurt no one, universal giveaway to woo the legions of the undecided. Something for everyone saw booze and fuel spared, flood defences, cathedrals, Shakespeare and the homeless remembered, with a bonanza for well-off ISA savers, a tampon tax spent on women, hurrah for a sugar tax for school sport, a love song to the local – and a love-bombing of small business, at most risk of Ukip sentiment.

Profligate, spending on the wrong people for the wrong reasons, never forget this was only made necessary because Osborne and Cameron tipped Britain into this referendum peril out of a momentary panic over Ukip’s rise, when Labour stood firm against it. Luckily, the careers and legacy of chancellor and prime minister hang on winning, with whatever bribery it takes. If they – and the country - survive the vote, expect a sharp autumn pull-back. Scrutiny will soon reveal how far all this apparent largesse covers up sinkholes in Osborne’s finances. But for now, we are left praying that this chimera of a budget can save us from their reckless folly.