George Osborne has been looking forward to this particular Autumn Statement for a while because it is the opportunity for him and other colleagues to tour the country like Santa with a large infrastructure sack, handing out £15bn of road improvements to marginal constituencies and helping voters feel as though the recovery is making their lives better.
Today is a day of jostling between the Chancellor and his Lib Dem colleagues who also want to take lots of credit for the goodies that they are handing out. But Wednesday looks as though it will be a little less cheerful, given the warning from the Ernst & Young Item Club that ‘the improvement in the public finances is in danger of not just stalling but going into reverse’. Nick Clegg told the Today programme this morning that the government has never shied from accepting that it is taking longer to cut the deficit than it thought it would and that some of the rhetoric around the spending reductions that are still needed was a bit ‘breathless’, but all three parties know that once they get over Wednesday, they are heading into a General Election which will hand the victor a pretty tall task when it comes to the public finances.
Every General Election is a good one to win – anyone who has spent any time at all in Opposition knows that the saying ‘this would be a good one to lose’ ignores the crushing boredom of being ignored while the government does things, especially if you disagree with those things. But that doesn’t stop 2015 being one of those elections where whoever wins won’t want champagne to celebrate but some whisky just to steel them for what’s ahead.
Osborne and co may not have shied away from admitting that it’s taking a longer (though they haven’t exactly been asking for the opportunity to make that clear, either), but they also didn’t expect to be in this situation where the big debate is about whether they can fill a black hole in the public finances without tax rises. Osborne claims he can, while Clegg said this morning that was nonsense. The reality will probably be that the Lib Dems end up getting their mansion tax, given Osborne wasn’t opposed to it when considering it for the 2012 Budget (which will be amusing given the fuss the Tories have made about Myleene Klass in recent weeks), but Osborne does want to focus on spending cuts, rather than tax rises.
Not even he thought he’d be in this situation, though: two years ago he boasted to a ministerial colleague that he couldn’t wait for the 2015 election because he could go in and have a great time cutting taxes while Labour looked on mournfully. But now the Chancellor will have to wait a good while longer until he reaches that magical tax cutting day. Until then, he will have to content himself with today’s roads bonanza.
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