Welfare dominates Osborne’s speech

George Osborne delivered everything we expected, and then some. This was a confident and wide-ranging speech from a Chancellor who has suddenly discovered a central message: what’s right about burning £120 million of taxpayers’ cash in debt interest payments every day? Wouldn’t it be better to get to grips with that waste as soon as possible? And that message percolated down through everything from his attack on Ed Miliband to his case for reforming our public services. “It’s like a credit card,” Osborne growled, “the longer you leave it, the worse it gets.”

But if that was the theme of Osborne’s symphony, then the motif was certainly welfare. Huge chunks of this speech could have been delivered by Iain Duncan Smith, and probably will be when he addresses conference tomorrow. There was an emphasis on “making work pay,” and on the “biggest reform of the welfare system since William Beveridge.”