Budget Sketch: Penny-pinchers like me can rejoice

That was a motto-blaster of a budget. George Osborne deployed half a dozen chewy new Tory slogans during this afternoon’s statement.

‘Britain walking tall again. … a country built on savings not debt … ten pounds off a tank under the Tories … Britain – the comeback country …’

It’s unclear whether:

a) Lynton Crosby feeds him these soundbites

b) Osborne auditions them on a freelance basis hoping to catch the great auteur’s ear.

He repeatedly called the country ‘one United Kingdom’ as well, bolstering Conservative claims that Labour is ready to sell Great Britain for dog-meat in a traitor’s deal with the SNP.

He doled out good news on every side. Growth, employment and deficit-slashery were all paraded as major achievements. There were glad tidings for penny-pinching savers, (like me), who can now keep a grand in the bank without paying tax.

And I raised a grateful hurrah when he lowered the duty on my favourite tipple: beer, cider and petrol.

Yuppies, once vilified as parasites, are being offered tax breaks on their starter homes. The government will do a Donald Trump and write a cheque for first-time buyers amounting to 25 per cent of any sum saved towards a house deposit. (Hardly a new wheeze, of course. It’s not dissimilar to mortgage tax relief.) The updated version will give the chancellor a fairy-godmother role in every property purchase. Classic Gordon Brown tactics.

Then Ed’s turn came. Answering the chancellor is the toughest gig in the opposition leader’s year. He has to dive blindfold into a swimming pool that may contain water, or custard, or nothing.

‘The budget that won’t be believed,’ he said delivering an instant verdict that he’d spent all week preparing.

He attacked the government over its key promise to vaporise the deficit by 2015. This is deadly for the Tories, or should be, since they asked to be judged specifically on this issue. So why doesn’t it harm them? Because no one believed them in 2010. And it’s widely assumed that politicians have sod-all control over economics. That’s why Cameron earns scant credit for ‘creating’ jobs or for overseeing steroidal growth.

Ed’s key ploy today was to address the fretters and the worriers and make them fret and worry a bit more. He predicted that the Tories would hike VAT and slash police and defence budgets, but when these cuts proved unworkable they’d shift the machete to the NHS. (Note to Ed: pessimism works best with depressives but they don’t vote because they’re too sad.)

He took an excellent pop at Cameron and Osborne by adapting the title of Grant Shapps’s seminal religious text, ‘Stinking Rich Three.’

‘I don’t know who Stinking Rich One and Two are.’

The posh boys blundered during Miliband’s response. TV cutaways showed them looking irascible and distracted on the front bench. Scrupulous vigilance would have worked better but they slumped in their seats like fidgety wage-slaves waiting for their commuter train to crawl into Waterloo.

Does it matter? Maybe not. The glumness of Labour’s backbenchers made a stark contrast with the Tories who cheered and roared in funfair mode. Parts of Miliband’s speech were heard in near silence. He threw himself into his performance with typical verve and passion but it fell to earth in soggy clumps like a reliable anecdote told to shivering vagrants in a wet underpass.