YESTERDAY’s U-turn by Chancellor George Osborne was humiliating. Do not let the cheering of the Tory backbenchers fool you.
It was a change of heart he did not want to make.
As Labour, the SNP, the LibDems and many others all try to claim credit for forcing Osborne’s hand, the reality is that it was likely the pressure of his own backbenchers.
Many Tory MPs were worried that they would be punished by voters who had trusted Cameron when he promised not cut tax credits.
Plenty of the more recent intake of MPs will have seen the video of Tory voting, mother-of-four Michelle Dorrell on Question Time as she broke down in tears and accused the Prime Minister of misleading her.
Osborne’s ideological pursuit of a surplus at all costs was going to hurt his own voters. His MPs, and indeed the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, realised this a long time before he did.
It was a humiliating U-turn, yes, but it will be consigned to the past soon, much in the same way the pasty tax was. Soon Osborne will be able to ask MPs and MSPs to back him and not Johnson or May when the time comes for David Cameron to stand down.
As much as the SNP might want to claim credit, it’s unlikely that their opinion matters much to the Chancellor. And he possibly enjoyed the sight of Labour and the SNP taking chunks out of each other in Holyrood over the issue.
Regardless of whoever is responsible, yesterday was a climbdown for Osborne, utterly and completely.
It was the sort of moment opposition parties live for.
A shadow chancellor with skill should have been able to see off the weak Chancellor, at the mercy of his backbenchers. This was an opportunity to point out the flip-flopping, inconsistent nature of the Government – a Government ruling not through principal, but through polling and political sophistry.
Instead we got John McDonnell and his copy of Mao’s Little Red Book.
Sometimes, when something seems like a good idea, it’s wise to stop and really think it through.
There was probably a clever point to what McDonnell was trying to do.
You could tell from the faces of the Labour benches around him as he did it, that they weren’t quite getting the cleverness of the stunt.
You could tell from the gleeful laughing and slapping of thighs on the Tory benches that they knew exactly what McDonnell had done.
Instead of yesterday being about the poor, the Tory u-turn, the cuts to housing benefit, the world focused on McDonnell and his book of quotes from a man who killed 70 million people.
It was sheer and utter incompetence. The Shadow Chancellor barely asked the Chancellor a question. There was no alternative vision. It was a stupid stunt up there with Ed Miliband’s Ed Stone.
Yesterday, in the chamber, the real opposition to the Tory Government remained the SNP, the LibDems and the Conservative back benches.
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