By rights, it should have been. The Tories are in a total mess over the economy. I have to admit, I held my peace on Sunday over this idea about having the Bank of England step in when banks get in trouble. It sounded pretty much identical to what the government is doing now, only with even less oversight, but I felt that I must have been missing something obvious. 36 hours of listening to the empty soundbites emanating from the mouths of Cameron and Osborne and I can safely say it is every bit as vacuous a policy as I thought it was.
Ditto this idea for an Office for Budget Responsibility. We live in an era where the government ignores its own watchdog regarding compensating the people caught up in the Equitable Life scandal; why should they worry about another quango wagging its finger at it?
This issue also threatens to divide the party. Hardliners are unlikely to take this lying down. At a stroke, Osborne has directly contradicted two of the main principles behind Dan Hannan and Douglas Carswell’s much vaunted “plan” – specifically:
* Devolving power to the lowest practicable level
* Replacing the quango state with genuine democracy
Quangos are now the panacea for everything while localism has been completely abandoned. As Carswell and Hannan like to remind people, they speak for a growing number of Tories these days, Tories who thought all that stuff about Cameron representing a new kind of Conservativism actually meant something. All that has been trashed now.
I actually got it wrong yesterday. I assumed that the Tories would underwrite a council tax freeze if inflation was running at 4-5%. Inflation may well be at that point if the Tories seize power at the next election (I hope not, but a massive interest rate cut now looks likely), yet Osborne only committed himself to a 2.5% freeze and even that was contingent on local authorities making cuts in their own public spending. So he isn’t willing to commit to public spending cuts at a national level but he is willing to impose them on perhaps the most efficient arm of the state, local government. Clue, anyone?
But perhaps the greatest indictment of the Tories on Monday was the video below. Highly reminiscent of Spinal Tap (note the shots of people sleeping during the speech – approx 1 min into the video), Osborne and Cameron manage to come across as feckless amateurs who are treating the whole thing like a jolly lark:
Seriously. Does anyone watch that video and not think “novices”?
See also: Sara Bedford, Jackie Ashley.