Today, George Osborne stepped back from the brink. The Chancellor has reversed his calamitous plan to tear away tax credits from the working poor, and will instead phase in the new system so no one will lose out. And he has also abandoned his reserve plan: to pay for this by raiding Universal Credit. In other words, he has done precisely what The Spectator has been calling for him to do and, in his expensive U-turn, safeguarded the Conservatives’ right to be called the workers’ party.
I didn’t quite believe this when he first announced it; over the years a gap has emerged between what the Chancellor says in the chamber and what the small print of his budget reveals. But this really does seem genuine. It’ll cost him £3.5bn in year one, falling to £500m later on. He plans other cuts (he’ll restrict Pension Credit and housing benefit for those who spend long periods out of the country, and introduce a lower sharers’ rate of housing benefit for social housing, etc).
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