The Narrowest Shoulders

Politics is not economics. George 'Gideon' Osborne has always conflated the two.

It used to be make him appear simply gauche, underlying his very shallow experience of economic matters. Now he is wielding power, it is far from a joke just for the columnists. His tenure at No. 11 will bring misery to millions and threatens to pull the whole economy into a nose dive.

During yesterday's Spending Review statement, Osborne (and Cameron too in PMQs) declared tritely, the UK was "out of the danger zone". Saying it, doesn't make it so.

Taking £81Bn out of the economy at the precise moment it is emerging groggily from the recession is a huge gamble with the highest of stakes. For all the yarns about huge benefit pay outs and massive capital projects, this amount is still much less than we, the taxpayer, paid out to prop up the banks.

In any event it was, as Alan Johnson pointed out, at least distasteful to see the Government benches cheer with delight at impending hardship for the least advantaged. Housing will no longer be built by Government and council tax rents will rocket. Housing benefit will be slashed. Osborne portays the recipients of this benefit as dole-ites who are making a pretty penny from the sweat of our brows. They don't actually get to keep the money which goes to the landlord, they just get to stay in their home.

Buried in the headlines was the announcement of a US style 12-month limit to those on sickness benefit. This pernicious policy will punish about a million people for living with the misfortune of having mental or physical problems which prevent them from seeking work.

Quite what happens when their time is up is not clear, short of destitution. But even if a few made an extraordinary recovery, they may not find jobs that easy when competing with four million others.

We knew the exact forecast of 490,000 public sector job losses from the couldn't-be-more-independent Office for Budget Responsibility because Danny 'Beaker' Alexander let the press read his briefing notes (above). The Lib-Dems complicity in this is pretty sickening - they are like the annoying ticks who pick on even smaller boys to please the school bullies but still gain no credibility.

Of course, throughout the catalogue of punishments came the soapy word 'fairness' to which Cameron nodded sagely like a benign Lord of the Manor. But I heard none of it, the child benefit cut for higher earners appears to be the only truely progressive measure and has already been shown to be uneven and unfair.

We've been here before, of course. This is 1980-1 all over again but even harsher. The social division from that era is still evident in many areas particularly the industrial ghost towns of Yorkshire, Tyneside and Lancashire. We also had civil unrest and riots then.

To think, the last Tory Prime Minister, John Major, sought "a nation at peace with itself."