This week George Osborne delivered a Budget that was even by his recent high standards, politically astute. He managed to silence Labour’s MPs by, as some have suggested, ‘borrowing’ the best bits of Ed Miliband’s policies. Of course, no one will remember that they were Ed’s policies, and it is the right of all governments to graze widely where it comes to where they get their policies from.
For the first time in weeks domestic politics has, at least for a while, trumped international developments especially in the EU.
So what can we learn from the political news this week?
- Osborne is doing a Blair. Labour in the run-up to the 1997 budget adopted the Conservatives’ stance on economy and crime. Osborne’s Living Wage is doing the same against Labour.
- The Greek government, tactical geniuses or naive? Putting the possible deal to a referendum and winning and then putting a new finance minister in place, offered the opportunity for a better agreement. If they can’t take the opportunity then the optimism will quickly fade.
- Business will not get an easy ride from the Conservatives. Part of the approach is to remove the blurred edges between what the state does and what businesses are expected to do.
- Iain Duncan Smith is just the quiet man. His reaction to Osborne’s announcement of the Living Wage shows that he can get quite excitable.
- The Labour leadership candidates have a problem. They now have a matter of weeks to work out how to respond to Osborne’s excursion onto their territory. It could be the making of one of the candidates.