This morning’s front pages are as good as they possibly could be for George Osborne given the scale of the cuts that he unveiled yesterday. The Chancellor has managed to blunt the severity of his Budget, at least in messaging, with his National Living Wage announcement, with even the more sceptical newspapers acknowledging that he didn’t just spend yesterday taking away from Britons.
Those sceptical papers first:
And then there are a fair few papers who are reasonably impressed:
And the Sun, which went for Osborne with a vengeance after the 2012 Budget, is very happy indeed:
Very, very happy….
This is the press that Osborne would have been after: he has sweetened every bitter pill in this Budget. The welfare cuts are sweetened by his announcement on pay, the impact of the pay announcement has been sweetened by his announcements on corporation tax and national insurance contributions, and even the ‘leftiness’ of the pay announcement has been sweetened for the Tory right with the pledge to maintain defence spending at 2 per cent.
It is a Budget that didn’t unravel on the first day, though there is already an awareness that his ‘living wage’ isn’t the sort of living wage that groups campaigning for such a rate would recognise. But given how tough this Budget had to be, the front pages haven’t been quite as downbeat as they could have been
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