Cicero's Songs

George Osborne's budget was an incoherent collection of gimmicks. It was not designed with any other purpose but the promotion of its author and a certain faux stability ahead of the EU referendum in three months time.  So, easy to criticize, but the fact is that at the moment, no political party in the UK is prepared to suggest the kind of reforms that are needed. The political cycle is too short for any government to reap the reward of the kind of radical changes that are required, but not long enough for the same government to avoid the negative consequences that such radical reform will inevitably bring with it. So, successive governments merely tinker with the system, knowing that to do more carries greater risks and limited rewards in the short term. The cost of tax administration in the UK continues to increase, and the ever more complicated system imposes greater fiscal drag and ever more distortion of the economy. Incomes remain heavily taxed, while land is barely tax...

It is, or ought to be, true that a citizen who is full time employment should be paid enough to live on.  So, unlike many on the so-called progressive wing of British politics, I am not in principle a supporter of tax credits. To me. the fiendishly complicated system devised by Gordon Brown was not a "leg up to the poor" but a subsidy to corporations who would not or could not pay a fair and sustaining wage. So when the British Finance Minister announced in his Budget that he intended to phase out tax credits and institute a much higher minimum wage- the so called "living wage", I did not leap to the defence of the expensive bureaucracy that the tax credit system has created.  However, George Osborne enjoys the game of politics far too much to want to play fair.  His agenda of the abolition of tax credits has now been subsumed into a wider ideological battle. In principle Osborne believes in a small state. He has a stated preference for simpler and lower taxes...

They sow the wind      and reap the whirlwind. The stalk has no head;      it will produce no flour. Were it to yield grain,      foreigners would swallow it up. Hosea 8-6 The first Conservative budget in 19 years is an act of of political hypocrisy so astonishingly blatant that it is hard to know whether to cringe at the opportunism or applaud the cynicism. George Osborne has the reputation as a masterful political tactician. Certainly he has been a astute observer of the political weather and occasionally he has been something of a rainmaker himself. His first Conservative budget is certainly far stronger from a political point of view that it is from an economic one. Take the Minimum Wage, which for the purposes of politics he re-branded as the "living wage". He portrayed the large increase as a "pay rise for Britain", yet the quid pro quo has been such a sharp reduction of in-work benefits that even such a "pay incre...