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George Osborne
‘George Osborne leaves behind acid burns that will take years to heal.’ Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images
‘George Osborne leaves behind acid burns that will take years to heal.’ Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images

With a whiff of sulphur, George Osborne was gone – but for how long?

This article is more than 6 years old
Polly Toynbee
Devious, cunning and cruel, as Tory chancellor he imposed his mendacious mantras on the national psyche. His legacy is a poisoned political landscape

Most politicians intend to do good, as they see it. It’s an odd quirk in public attitudes that the idea of democracy is revered but its practitioners are, mostly, reviled: from graffiti in ancient Rome, it was ever thus. Political commentators need to appreciate the practitioners, however opposing their views.

But there are some bad hats and chancers in politics. George Osborne, who leaves the grand stage of the Commons at the age of 45 saying, “I want new challenges”, was a gamer, departing now to throw his dice in journalism and the City.

It was the grave misfortune of so many millions that the sport he and his old friend David Cameron enjoyed for a while was playing with lesser people’s lives in the great game of politics. But hey, it was fun while it lasted, and the heir to the 17th baronet is off to lucrative and combative pastures new.

To be not always serious is no sin: the Commons is leavened by a few wits and dandies, but Osborne’s political games were sulphurous. He leaves behind acid burns on the national psyche that will take years to heal. He could leave his successors a there’s- no-money note in blazing capital letters, bequeathing a national debt that increased by far more in his six years than it did in Labour’s three terms combined – but that’s small beer compared with the scars he leaves on public attitudes.

It was, I suppose, just politics as usual to profoundly misinform people about the economy he inherited. Gordon Brown’s great service as prime minister was to rescue the entire banking system when it was hours from collapse, and to leave an economy growing again after that shock. This, Osborne, PPE graduate, well knew.

Even as he rightly criticised Labour for lax regulation of banking and debt, he airbrushed his own repeated pre-crash calls for a lighter touch on his City backers. He seized the moment to justify setting about shrinking the state to below anything seen here or in similar European economies, though that tourniquet choked off the recovery he inherited. He left an even worse balance-of-trade deficit and the lowest productivity among equivalent countries in a house-price-dependent economy with virtually no new housing.

Britain had “maxed out its credit card”, he claimed. That’s an image people understand all too well, though he knew it to be nonsense on stilts when applied to the national economy. In an echo chamber, he hammered in the message: you know Labour always borrows and spends recklessly; you know we could never afford all that extra funding for the NHS and education, all those 3,500 children’s centres, all those splendidly revived proud city centres. His indelible political message dies hard, and Labour may take years to retrieve economic trust. So far, so politically cunning.

Of course he knew he was talking nonsense economics, the proof there in his own budgets, one after another: he knew his promised deficit-free “balanced budget” was political rhetoric as it slipped from five to 10 to probably not even 15 years from 2010. If he was genuinely a fiscal-rectitude iron chancellor, he would have pursued that goal. Instead, he gave out a mammoth £40bn in tax cuts to business and the better-off, in needless capital gains cuts and in this month’s new £1m inheritance tax threshold. His craftiest tax cut was in the popular raising of income tax thresholds labelled as helping the low-paid, though three quarters of the phenomenal cost goes to rewarding higher earners.

His austerity was real enough for cutting public services to the very marrow, but generosity was the political game in tax cuts to mainly Tory voters. Other Tory allies ended up better off too: Osborne cut 20% from BBC funds – something that would have delighted the Murdoch executives and their boss, with whom he had several meetings.

But his economic failures can be repaired. They fade into insignificance beside his poisonous political legacy. He framed the political argument of this era and imposed his mendacious mantras on the national frame of mind so every man, woman and child in vox pops can repeat them over and over again.

Most unforgivable, light years beyond politics-as-usual, was his systematic demonisation of the poorest. Even as he said “all in it together” he cast the cruellest cuts on those with least. This month over £12bn benefit cuts fall on the low-paid, the sick and disabled. His raising of the minimum wage barely touches what he took away in tax credits within universal credit, in benefit freezes, and in ever rising bars to qualify for anything. By 2020 those cuts will have cast 50% more children into poverty, the steepest rise for a generation, says the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

But worse than reversible cuts was the resentment he instilled. That despicable image of the shirking family with the blinds down as the striving family heads out to work was monstrous because most of the poor on benefits are also in work.

Monstrous, too, was his benefits cap, because it sounded so cleverly reasonable to limit families to £23,000 – unless you know the private rents paid in the south of England. As council housing vanishes, Osborne’s “affordable” is Orwellian Newspeak for utterly beyond the reach of half the population.

Together with Iain Duncan Smith, he set about denigrating disabled people as no other Tory government had done before, sending out stories of cheats running marathons to cover blatant, knowing cruelty.

Devious, malevolent and apparently indifferent to the consequences for millions of lives, Osborne has deliberately laid waste to the social security system. But far worse, he has demolished trust in it, undermining the idea that the state should support the weak, subsidise low-earners in housing they can afford or care for the sick. The fabric could be restored by future governments of good will, but rebuilding lost public trust will be far harder.

Away he goes, earning £650,000 a year from BlackRock, £800,000 for 15 speaking engagements plus a £120,000 stipend from a US thinktank. But for one born into a fortune, money isn’t money – it’s just ostentatious chips in the combative game of success. With a straight face, he says his London Evening Standard editorship will give the public “straight facts and informed opinion to help them to make the big decisions Britain now faces about the kind of country we want to be”. That would be a first in his career.

Most politicians, however high they rise, leave few footprints: Osborne leaves a long-lasting legacy of deeply, truly, unprecedented Tory nastiness. Gone “for now” – hasta la vista. He may be back if the great game looks worth playing again.

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