Tom Watson writes:
The Conservative Party has spent the last week
braying about the principle of ‘freedom’.
But their noise is all bluster – designed to hide from the public a stark and disappointing fact: George Osborne’s budget was one of the most unprincipled pieces of politicking in recent history.
Even his flagship policy, the scrapping of our near-compulsory pension annuity safety-net, comes unstuck when you look at it properly. He says it is about giving people choice, about setting people free.
Of course the annuities market needs reform but for the nearly 6 million public sector workers who live out their vocation in nursing, teaching and local council services, George Osborne has decided 'freedom' doesn’t matter after all.
If he was really standing up for a principle then he would say that public sector employees have worked equally hard for their money and are entitled to their pensions on the same terms as anyone in the private sector.
Yet they are barred from taking advantage of the elaborate tax loophole that Osborne has just gifted the rest of the country.
I wonder if that’s because they tend not to vote Tory anyway.
David Willetts, one of the most thoughtful Conservative Ministers, who is currently being nudged towards the exit by Cameron, used to say that Osborne was good at ‘grammar school solutions’.
I take it to mean the Chancellor is very good at theory – working out what should work, but appalling at the practice.
When it comes to the real world, George Osborne is lost. He has lots of clever answers but never the right answer.
He doesn’t know how to make Britain a better place in the long-term. And what’s worse, I don’t believe he really cares.
We have seen the consequences of Osborne’s ‘grammar school solutions’ previously, when a budget unravelled before our very eyes.
He’s learned from the pasty tax fiasco, and the impact of this budget will probably not be Osborne’s to clean up.
But someone will have to fix the mess created by this Government’s short-term and transactional cynicism.
It could well be the Labour party that is tasked with cleaning up the mess left by the Tories.
That’s why I couldn’t vote for the so called ‘welfare cap’.
I don’t often rebel and I always want to support my party and leader.
But Diane Abbott was right - you cannot play with people’s lives in the name of temporary political tactics. It is unprincipled.
And worse than that, it is trying to play Osborne at his game, when really we need to be talking about the alternatives.
There will be tough decisions to take if Labour comes to power.
But we need to show the British people that we are prepared to take them in the interests of a shared national purpose – in the name of ambition for Britain – not on the whim of the latest focus group.
A more entrepreneurial Britain. A fairer Britain. A Britain that prizes kindness.
All of this is possible if we apply ourselves to the question ‘what kind of country do we want to build?’ rather than the question of ‘what does YouGov say about this amendment?’
But their noise is all bluster – designed to hide from the public a stark and disappointing fact: George Osborne’s budget was one of the most unprincipled pieces of politicking in recent history.
Even his flagship policy, the scrapping of our near-compulsory pension annuity safety-net, comes unstuck when you look at it properly. He says it is about giving people choice, about setting people free.
Of course the annuities market needs reform but for the nearly 6 million public sector workers who live out their vocation in nursing, teaching and local council services, George Osborne has decided 'freedom' doesn’t matter after all.
If he was really standing up for a principle then he would say that public sector employees have worked equally hard for their money and are entitled to their pensions on the same terms as anyone in the private sector.
Yet they are barred from taking advantage of the elaborate tax loophole that Osborne has just gifted the rest of the country.
I wonder if that’s because they tend not to vote Tory anyway.
David Willetts, one of the most thoughtful Conservative Ministers, who is currently being nudged towards the exit by Cameron, used to say that Osborne was good at ‘grammar school solutions’.
I take it to mean the Chancellor is very good at theory – working out what should work, but appalling at the practice.
When it comes to the real world, George Osborne is lost. He has lots of clever answers but never the right answer.
He doesn’t know how to make Britain a better place in the long-term. And what’s worse, I don’t believe he really cares.
We have seen the consequences of Osborne’s ‘grammar school solutions’ previously, when a budget unravelled before our very eyes.
He’s learned from the pasty tax fiasco, and the impact of this budget will probably not be Osborne’s to clean up.
But someone will have to fix the mess created by this Government’s short-term and transactional cynicism.
It could well be the Labour party that is tasked with cleaning up the mess left by the Tories.
That’s why I couldn’t vote for the so called ‘welfare cap’.
I don’t often rebel and I always want to support my party and leader.
But Diane Abbott was right - you cannot play with people’s lives in the name of temporary political tactics. It is unprincipled.
And worse than that, it is trying to play Osborne at his game, when really we need to be talking about the alternatives.
There will be tough decisions to take if Labour comes to power.
But we need to show the British people that we are prepared to take them in the interests of a shared national purpose – in the name of ambition for Britain – not on the whim of the latest focus group.
A more entrepreneurial Britain. A fairer Britain. A Britain that prizes kindness.
All of this is possible if we apply ourselves to the question ‘what kind of country do we want to build?’ rather than the question of ‘what does YouGov say about this amendment?’
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