The great creep forward

It took Tony Blair about five years to work out what he wanted to do with his government and George Osborne appears to be on a similar, depressingly slow learning curve. It’s not that he lacks ideas. There were plenty of good ones in his mini-budget this week, including tax cuts for the low paid, and for companies. But none of this will speed the recovery. ‘It’s taking time, but the British economy is healing,’ the Chancellor said, to laughter in the house. We are not even halfway through the recovery.

To go through the small print of the budget was to grasp just how vile the outlook is. At election time, voters tend to ask themselves: are you better off than you were at the last election? According to Osborne’s new forecasts, most will answer ‘no’. To make it worse, far from having abolished the deficit by 2015, Britain is now on course to shoulder the worst deficit of any major western country.