Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer has defended his government’s record in protecting the vulnerable and admitted that cuts to disability benefits announced in last week’s budget were a mistake.
However, in a combative performance in the House of Commons, George Osborne repeatedly refused to apologise for proposing the cuts, which have now been withdrawn.
In his first Commons appearance since the resignation of work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, Mr Osborne sought to rally Conservative MPs by turning the budget debate into a partisan conflict with Labour.
The chancellor hit back aggressively at criticism from Labour MPs, winning cheers from his own backbenchers, many of whom had dismissed him privately as political roadkill just hours earlier.
Mr Osborne paid tribute to Mr Duncan Smith, whose resignation had been seen as an arrow aimed at the chancellor, but his tone was polite rather than warm.
“I’m sorry that my right honourable friend chose to leave the government and let me here in this house recognise his achievements in helping to make work pay, protecting the vulnerable and breaking the decades old cycle of welfare dependency,” he said.
The chancellor rejected Mr Duncan Smith’s central accusation, that his policies favoured the better-off and the elderly over the poor of working age, who did not vote Conservative.
‘Hopes and aspirations’
“These are the people that I am fighting for, real decent hard-working people, not numbers on a treasury spreadsheet but people whose lives would be impoverished, whose hopes and aspirations would be crushed if we had gone on spending more and more than the country earned,” Mr Osborne said.
“Getting things right for these people is what I’m all about and it weighs on every decision I have taken as chancellor over the last six years. These are the people that we in this party have been elected to serve.”
He also rejected as “a classic socialist illusion” the idea that it was necessary to tax the rich more and increase public spending to protect the vulnerable.
“There is not some inherent conflict between delivering social justice and the savings required to deliver sound public finances.
“They are one and the same thing. Without sound public finances there is no social justice,” he said.
Calculations
Mr Osborne’s reversal on disability benefit cuts has left a £4.4 billion (€5.6 billion) gap in his budget calculations and he will not say how he will fill it until the autumn. Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell said the chancellor’s figures simply did not add up.
Mr McDonnell accused Mr Osborne of behaving dishonourably towards Mr Duncan Smith by seeking to make him take the blame for the ill-conceived disability benefit cuts.
“Let me make it clear from the outset that, in my view – and, I believe, that of many others – the behaviour of the chancellor over the last 11 days calls into question his fitness for the office he now holds,” Mr McDonnell said.
“What we’ve seen is not the actions of a chancellor, a senior government minister, but the grubby, incompetent manipulations of a political chancer.”
Mr Osborne received support from former Conservative chancellor Ken Clarke, who said that last week's budget was, if anything, not harsh enough.
“I never faced problems of the kind that my right honourable friend actually inherited from his predecessor, but had I been in his position I expected a much tougher budget,” Mr Clarke said.
