George Osborne delivered a budget built on failure. He failed on closing the government deficit. He has failed on reducing the government debt. His politically precious but economically nonsensical target for a budget surplus at the end of this parliament is remaining intact only as a result of creative accounting, shuffling around billions in corporation tax revenues.

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There is no dead cat big enough for George Osborne to throw that distracts from his failure in this budget. His last-minute U-turn on the sugar tax has the appearance of a political manoeuvre, rather than a credible plan to address a serious public concern. Labour agrees with the chancellor that tackling obesity is a public health priority. Yet he needs to answer why he cut public health funding by £200m.

The official forecasts presented alongside the budget make for grim reading. Growth has been revised down, far more than was widely expected, and so too has wage growth, which means we will be earning less as a nation.

Household borrowing is set to rise further. Business investment has been revised down. Our borrowing from the rest of the world is expected to reach eye-watering new heights.

Forecasts for productivity, which is about how much we produce in each hour we work, have slumped. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which produces the official forecasts, has taken the exceptional step of saying that productivity growth will be 7.5% lower between 2010 and 2020 than it previously thought.

The gap between how much the UK produces per hour and the rates in comparable countries such as the US, Germany and France is now the biggest for a generation. Without productivity growth, too many of us will end up in low-paid, insecure work.

There is an extraordinary contrast between these new figures and the sunny prospects offered by Osborne just a few months ago in November’s autumn statement. From bragging then that he was getting better results than expected, he flipped at the new year to warning of an ominous “cocktail of threats” in the global economy.

It is true that there are warning signs out there, from the Chinese slowdown to the emerging markets debt bubble and the slump in commodity prices. But he was warned about these back in the autumn. Many, including myself, said there were warning signs ahead.

Osborne did not listen. He should have shored up the economy against the gathering storm with investment, as a growing consensus amongst economists and international organisations such as the IMF are now recommending. His failure to do so means our economy is now more, not less, exposed to economic headwinds.

The price of his multiple failures are being borne by the most vulnerable.

As Jeremy Corbyn said in his speech responding to Osborne, there is an unfairness at the core of this budget. Huge cuts in payments to disabled people, hitting as many as 600,000, are stacked up alongside a major tax giveaway to the super-rich in the form of capital gains tax cuts.

Unbelievably, in 2020-21, the government’s own figures show one-third of all the “savings” Osborne expects to make in that year will come from cuts to the payments to those with disabilities.

Labour is part of the growing consensus, from business leaders to trade unions, calling for investment in the future. We will eliminate the government’s deficit on day-to-day spending in a fair and responsible way, sticking closely to our new fiscal credibility rule, drawn up with the advice of world-leading economists.

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And we will make sure that the government can invest in the infrastructure and technology that will help us deliver the high-wage, fairer and more prosperous economy of the future.

Britain deserves better than this.