Osborne's medicine – is it harsh enough?

Shadow Chancellor George Osborne recently detailed some of the "harsh medicine" needed to deal with the £175bn budget deficit. But it may not be harsh enough.

"Elections are not often won by telling voters they will have to pay more for less, and work longer into the bargain," says The Economist. But George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, leapt from "boy wonder to national pallbearer" last week by detailing some of the "harsh medicine" needed to deal with the £175bn budget deficit (equivalent to 12.4% of GDP). This includes public-sector pay freezes, the withdrawal of some middle-class tax breaks, retention of Labour's 50% top tax rate and a retirement age of 66. It was a bold step, and "all credit to him".

Credit? Osborne's "harebrained" proposals are a "disaster that would drive us into a depression, and fast", says David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, in the Daily Express. We are still in the deepest recession since the 1930s and the bad times are far from over. The biggest danger we face is that governments tighten policy too soon. "We are in an economic war. If you go into war you have to keep going. Clearly you need to control the debt, but why now? Did Churchill say we can't carry on fighting the Germans because of worries about the debt?"

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Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.