George Osborne has seen the light on tax cuts. Now he needs to implement some more

George Osborne has not been a complete disappointment as Chancellor. He has, it is depressing to note, ended up giving Britain a leisurely ten years to get back in the black while the national debt soars. He has a worrying enthusiasm for finding new ways of hawking underpriced debt to business and homebuyers. But the British recovery is now gathering pace, Britain has more jobs than ever, and if you trawl the small print of his Budget statements, you can find a number of things that Osborne is getting right.

He has stuck to his plan to shed hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs. And what Ed Balls dismissed as a right-wing fantasy has come true: two private sector jobs have been created for every public sector job lost. Osborne has also cut the top rate of income tax from 50 per cent to 45 per cent; and the share of tax collected from the richest has jumped to a new high: the best-paid 1 per cent now contribute 30 per cent of all income tax collected.