“I am not going to hide the hard choices from the British people.” “We have had to pay the bills of past irresponsibility.” “We have been tough, but we have also been fair.”
Those words could have been spoken just this week by Prime Minister Keir Starmer – but they actually came from newly-minted chancellor George Osborne unveiling his first Budget all the way back in 2010.
Reading it back now, it is striking how much of it could have been said by the new Labour Government now preparing to take the axe to public spending.
For Osborne’s monomaniacal focus on “the deficit”, read Labour’s obsession with the “black hole” in the public finances.
Where the Tory chancellor promised “tough” measures, Keir Starmer setting out his grim vision for the immediate future promised “pain”.
One word not mentioned in either Starmer’s speech on Tuesday morning or in Osborne’s June 2010 budget: “Austerity”.
It is the word that came to define the Cameron-Osborne years and now, 14 years on, it’s rearing its head again.
In the nine years after Osborne delivered his first budget – he was long gone as chancellor by then – the UK Government had axed around £37 billion in today’s money from welfare, housing and social services budgets.
The most powerful symbol of how austerity changed Britain is the runaway rise of food banks during the years of Tory rule.
When the Conservatives came to power in 2010, the UK’s largest food bank network, the Trussell Trust, ran around 35 food banks. By 2019, that number had increased by around 3614% to something in the region of 1300, enough to give every city in the UK 17 food banks each.
Austerity made life expectancy worse in poorer parts of the country. It cut average life expectancy by a year and a half. It killed about 190,000 people between 2010 and 2019. That’s the equivalent of nearly everyone in Aberdeen dying in nine years.
Of course, when Osborne read out his first Budget in the House of Commons on a sunny day in June 14 years ago, he didn’t say that life expectancy would fall, that regional inequalities would widen, that people would die or suffer from the return of Victorian diseases like rickets.
Quite the opposite. In fact, he spoke of the how he planned to tackle the “disparities” between the regions in Britain’s “deeply unbalanced” economy. He said: “We are all in this together”. The Budget “protects the most vulnerable in our society”, he said. “Yes, it is tough, but it is also fair.”
On a sunny day in August, or as it was in London at least, Starmer set out how he planned to take measures to deal with the Tory “black hole”. Yes, that would be “tough”, but those with the “broadest shoulders” would be asked to share the burden.
It remains to be seen what measures Chancellor Rachel Reeves will announce in her Budget at the end of October. There won’t be movement on the two-child benefit cap, the end of the universal Winter Fuel Payment looks set to stay put. Starmer promised it would be “painful”.
It’s a waiting game to find out exactly how painful – and who will hurt the most.
