THIS was a bad Budget. Bad for those who are sick, bad for those who are unemployed, bad for those in work on low wages, bad for families struggling to live with dwindling incomes. And bad indeed for our young people.

Let’s once again nail the lie that we are going to have a “national living wage”. No, we’re not. We’re going to have a small increase in the minimum wage to £7.20 an hour. A minimum wage that independent experts calculate should be £7.85, just to keep pace with current prices. That’s the level needed before you make the deduction families in need will face from the cuts announced in child tax credits.

Anyone with a wonky calculator can work out that there is no gain here. And yet we are treated to cynical political spin from the Tories made evident by the glee of Iain Duncan Smith. Glee that we all might be daft enough to fall for the spin and not do our own sums to see right through this piece of chicanery. And all of that alongside tax cuts for the very businesses that have helped to create in-work poverty while seeing their profits and bonuses grow.

Like many I watched the coverage and the line being spun that the Tory austerity drive has been slowed. What nonsense.

It hasn’t been slowed in the slightest with £34.9 billion coming to the Treasury from cuts to welfare. Further reduction in the household welfare cap outside London, cuts to child tax credits, a freeze on in-work benefits – and increased taxes that directly affect many of those struggling to keep their heads above water in insurance taxes and car tax. Alongside all of this, a continuing one per cent cap on public-sector pay.

Many people will be badly hit. As the Resolution Foundation says, “ it will take many struggling families years before they earn their way back to their current position”.

And for children and young people, the picture is bleak indeed –Osborne’s indefensible version of the Chinese one-child policy with his limit on child and universal benefits to two children per family. More children will grow up in poverty. A poverty which every scrap of evidence shows damages their life chances. Housing benefit removed for under-21s, and under-25s condemned to more years of poverty pay and age wage discrimination. A generation condemned to be worse off than their parents.

This is not a Budget to help the economy or incentivise economic growth. There is a net cut of £5bn in public-sector investment over the next five years, no encouragement to build, to invest, to be enterprising, to grow your small or medium-sized business. Of housebuilding, transport infrastructure, market connectivity, not a squeak.

Instead, “the biggest-ever” sale of public-sector assets. Assets paid for by those “hard-working British families” Osborne is fond of citing and claiming as his own.

Let’s not be fooled this is a responsible Government acting to reduce the deficit and balance the books. The Tories have consistently failed to do that in the past five years, despite the misery they have heaped on the majority. This week, Osborne extended his timeline on that, yet again.

By their own admission, this Budget is all part of his ideological drive for a low-tax, low-welfare Britain. A Britain paid for by the poorest and most vulnerable in our communities, by the young and the old, by those in work and those not. A drive of which one commentator said “ Mrs Thatcher would have approved”.

And he has only just begun. This is Tory ideology, unfettered.

Later this year he will announce more cuts in public-sector spending. More public-sector job losses, more reductions in public services, more misery.

IN all of this, the greatest threat to us is that we lose hope. We allow our young people to lose hope. What if we become so worn down by the struggle to pay the bills and feed our families, so demoralised by working long hours in as many jobs as we can muster, but all for poverty wages, or ground down by the continuing search for work that isn’t there and the irrational and unreasonable sanctions imposed when we don’t “succeed”? If we allow ourselves to become divided and turn on each other, forgetting who the real architects of our misery are? That would be the Tories’ great victory. If we allow ourselves to forget there is an alternative to all of this.

And if we stop arguing for that alternative and coming together to help each other? So while we rail against this Budget and the one to come, let’s also make the case loud and strong for the alternative – the Budget that invests in our economy, creates the conditions for employment, supports our public services and cares for those most in need. A Budget that fairly distributes our nation’s wealth and the payment of our debts. The Budget we deserve.