Populism has arrived, blue in tooth and claw. Rishi Sunak’s budget, clearly dictated from 10 Downing Street, proposes a staggering £600bn of extra public spending over the current parliament, showing an enthusiasm for public spending not seen seen since postwar reconstruction in the 1950s. Apart from cash set aside for coronavirus, it is going not into people’s pockets but largely into state infrastructure. As it rises, it will carry one signature: Boris Johnson’s.

No one can complain that a chancellor should prepare to meet a pandemic trauma. Seeking relief for those unable to work makes sense. So does short-term aid to businesses suffering a collapse in demand. But the deeper interest in any budget lies in what it reveals of a government’s mind. Sunak’s budget had one message: that the British economy is in the ownership of central government, as not seen since denationalisation in the 1980s.

Sunak made almost no mention of the private sector, except for short-term fiscal relief. His economy was a public construct of hospitals, schools, colleges, roads, railways, research institutes – all supplied by the grace of London. I calculated that his speech gave away an extra £1.7m of taxpayers’ money every second: generosity on a Neronian scale. Small wonder Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn was left stumbling over how to object. He should just have smiled and said thank you.

Absent from the speech was any idea that the public sector belonged to anyone but Sunak. As for local government, there was to be no let-up in austerity. While “our” NHS is to roll in cash, local government’s share of the welfare state, social care and social services got nothing extra. There was no mention of old people or family support or youth clubs: chief victims of the 30% cut in local council spending since 2010. Downward pressure will continue on libraries, day centres, sports fields, drug rehabilitation and facilities for young people.

Central government can borrow and spend at will. Local government is allowed no such liberality for its services. There was no whisper from Sunak of a let-up in rate capping, no new sources of local revenue, no hope of council tax revaluation. If cuts continue, they are not central government’s responsibility. Blame your hapless, wasteful local council.

In contrast, Downing Street is splurge central. Anything the NHS asks for, says Sunak, be it “millions or billions”, it can have. He pledges to pay for 50m more surgery appointments. What other government on Earth would boast such implausible specificity? No such offer is made for local care visits, on which the NHS relies for backup. This is built-in unfairness and inefficiency.

At times Sunak sounded as if Johnson wanted to be everyone’s mayor. He wants to run everything. He is to allow a redevelopment at Darlington station, a village bypass in north Wales, hotel bedrooms for 6,000 rough sleepers. He announced £8m for new football fields, grants for new maths teachers and £25,000 for an art teacher in every school. This sounds like window dressing, a sort of blame-shedding for Tory austerity.

Sunak’s Father Christmas act continued. There is to be an astronomical billion pounds for tower block cladding. “Over a hundred” road junctions are to be improved. Fifty million potholes have been identified as needing repair. Has Sunak counted them? As a cultural uplift for poor Teessiders, rumour has it that Sunak is to send 750 of his brightest and best officials to live among them. This is like a Victorian missionary expedition.

I cannot imagine any other country, democracy or dictatorship, where the centre would so obsessively micromanage its public sector. Britain is off the graph for centralisation. Its local government now has a mere 1.6% of GDP for its spending, against 6% in Germany, 12% in France and 15% in Sweden. In the eye of Whitehall, anything beyond London is now “regional”, never local.

The new elected metro-mayors were carefully assigned “regions” not cities, lest they over-identify and go native. They depend not on accountable local taxes but on Treasury handouts. As Professor Tony Travers of LSE puts it: “Devolution means mayors are allowed an opportunity to talk to the Treasury about how to spend money.” They are Whitehall agents.

Central cash for locally run services – police, schools, transportation – increasingly relies on hypothecated hand-outs, on Whitehall decisions as to how they are to be spent. Capping and ring-fencing money for police numbers, or subject teachers or new roads, is not communal choice. It is not what most countries would regard as local democracy. It is subservience to central command and control to a single leader.

This is the new egocentric populism. It has virtues. It is non-ideological. Its macroeconomics has Keynesian features, buying new public projects in advance of tough times, albeit at the risk of “crowding out” the private sector. It is not partisan, witness on Wednesday as former Thatcherite Tories bayed support for a budget they would have damned had it come from a Labour chancellor. A fleeting piquant moment came with a still, small voice speaking up for old Tory caution. It was Theresa May, speaking truth to power.

Johnson’s populism is extreme. Not even Donald Trump tries to run the US this way. It is government more in the style of Orbán’s Hungary or Erdoğan’s Turkey, relying on seeking current votes by borrowing from future taxpayers. In doing so, Johnson is suppressing what should be the fountainhead of political freedom: local democracy. Who cares whether or not this is Toryism. It is wrong.

• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist