IAIN MACWHIRTER
Jeremy Corbyn let David Cameron off the hook. Tthat won’t be forgotten Page 15
IT WAS not the Robin Hood Budget previous Chancellors had sought to deliver but more a Sheriff of Nottingham Budget with money being taken from the poor to give to the rich. With Labour tails up for once, Westminster’s set-piece drama yesterday had David Cameron on the defensive, insisting his Government remained a modern and compassionate force for good in the wake of the devastating attack from former Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith.
There is still a debate raging about Mr Duncan Smith’s motives. At the weekend, he passionately claimed that personalities were not involved and the targeting of disability benefits was just a cut too far; that for too long his department had become the cash cow George Osborne focused on to make more ideologically driven cuts.
Yet Mr Duncan Smith sat in the pre-Budget Cabinet last week and said nothing; indeed, his colleagues all believed he was supportive of cuts to disability benefits that his department had helped draw up. Westminster insiders believe that, on the back of a Remain vote on June 23, the Brexit-supporting Mr Duncan Smith was for the chop anyway.
His bad blood with the Chancellor goes back years and so, in the context of the EU referendum, now was as good a time as any to make a dramatic exit.
But it was the Essex MP’s primary accusation that went to the heart of Mr Cameron’s premiership, which the Prime Minister has always insisted is based on compassion; its power came because the attack was not from the likes of Jeremy Corbyn or John McDonnell but from a right- wing patrician Tory. This makes the task of healing wounds all the more difficult after the EU vote and a decision to stay; a decision to exit the Brussels club, of course, would be curtains for Mr Cameron and his Chancellor.
An interesting aspect of the Tory “civil war” has been the deafening silence of Ruth Davidson on the disability benefit cuts issues; she was previously opposed to the child tax credit cuts.
The Scottish Conservative leader has been trying to convince voters north of the Border that the Tories are not quite as toxic as those south of it. The drama of the last few days will not have helped her cause to make the Scottish Tories leapfrog Labour in the Holyrood poll and become the Scottish Parliament’s official opposition.
Stephen Crabb, Mr Duncan’s Smith successor, told MPs the UK Government had “no plans” to make further welfare cuts. Yet we are still in the dark as to where the £4.4 billion in cuts meant to be delivered by reductions in disability benefits will come from.
Mr Osborne no doubt hopes higher growth and large tax revenues will, in time, fill the hole or he might have to make more difficult choices.
Today, he will finally make an appearance at the Commons Dispatch Box to close the parliamentary debate on the Budget. He will insist his Budget is that of a “compassionate, one nation Conservative government determined to deliver both social justice and economic security”. But the Chancellor will have to give the performance of his life to keep alive his ambition of succeeding Mr Cameron.