Will Bunn: Why George Osborne still runs Britain
Fifteen years ago, on 11 May 2010, George Osborne arrived in the Treasury with a mandate to change the British economy. The deficit had reached more than £100bn, a hole in Britain’s finances twice the size of the armed forces. Who was to blame? The truth was confusing, technical and international. It involved understanding mortgage-backed securities and credit contraction. It was also depressing, because the people who were most at fault (investment bankers) would obviously never pay for the damage. So the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats sold the public a simpler, more satisfying story: it was Labour’s fault, for spending too much money.
This was probably the most consequential and obvious lie in modern British politics, bigger even than the claims that would be made about the EU six years later. It was a risk, but Osborne told the story better than anyone else in his party, and it opened the door to becoming a more radical government. The story also contained its own solution, which was the Conservative principle that government spending is not a benefit to the country, but a problem to be solved. ...
hat are Labour’s ideas? The public is left guessing from a series of muddles. We know Labour wants a stronger border force, an improved NHS, thousands more teachers, and the state-assisted rollout of renewable energy. But it also wants to achieve these things with a smaller state that borrows less. It wants to improve social care, while letting fewer people into the country to take jobs in social care, and without changing the tax system that funds it. It wants to reset our relationship with the EU without repeating the Brexit wars. It wants to train the people needed to build 1.5 million homes using an additional yearly budget smaller than that of the University of Hull. It wants to address inequality and poverty while cutting disability benefits, removing the winter fuel allowance from ten million pensioners and maintaining the two-child limit on Universal Credit.
This leaves the one clear set of principles to which we know Rachel Reeves is dedicated: her fiscal rules. I recently asked the polling company Ipsos to survey the public on how many people could explain a fiscal rule, or even name one. Of a representative sample of more than 1,000 people, the most popular response was: “Don’t know.” The second most popular response was, “Closing the £22bn black hole,” which is incorrect. Just 4 per cent of voters were confident that they had a strong understanding of Reeves’ fiscal rules. Four times that number had “never heard of them”. ,,,
(Link to long but interesting article in the New Statesman):
https://www.newstatesman.com/cover-story/2025/05/why-george-osbourne-still-runs-britain