Osborne’s speech contained not a whiff of radicalism

I’m afraid I did not detect a “new economic model” in George Osborne’s speech. He has said he will “eliminate “a large part” of the deficit (ie, the amount that debt goes up by) over the next parliament. In questions, he kept repeating this phrase: “a large part” – and which is woolier than Labour’s plan to halve it. When asked about this he said that he would do more than half it – but gave no indication by how much. It could be a lot, or a negligible amount. We still don’t know.

Most popular

Steerpike

Douglas Murray wins defamation case against Observer

Osborne said he will stick to what was, in my view, the root error of the recession: the 2 percent CPI target. Inflation was fine in the boom years – it was asset price inflation that pointed to the debt bubble. No one noticed, because everyone was fixated on CPI.