The UK Budget 2015.

Today the UK Finance Minister George Osborne announced his budget for the coming year. Now that we've moved to fixed term Parliaments I was hoping that this rather silly spectacle could have been done away with. After all with just two weeks left of this government it's a little hard to take its predictions for the next year let alone the next five years at all seriously.

Osborne himself seemed to be mocking it by making some incredible claims the most outrageous of which being that the UK could soon overtake the US and China as the World's leading economy.

The big headline was that the economic plan of Osborne and his Conservative Party has failed entirely. Despite all the austerity they have not succeeded in eliminating the national deficit and have not halved the national debt. Instead what they've been doing over the last three years of so is adopt Labour's economic policy while pursuing an aggressive program of restructuring British society to favour the rich at the expense of the poor. For example the NHS which is undoubtedly the UK's largest public service was not mentioned at all in this budget.

However despite being run according to Labour's economic policy it is a Conservative government that is delivering it so Osborne was keen to convince us how well everything is going in an effort to win votes at the upcoming election. This required rather a lot of spin on Osborne's behalf.

For example he has introduced a new measure of how household wealth allowing him to declare that all households are wealthier then they were under the old measure. Osborne also pointed out that living standards are higher then they were four years ago rather neatly forgetting that he's been in power for five years.

Another questionable claim is that with growth of 2.4% in 2014 the UK was growing faster then any other economy. What Osborne forgot to mention is that this is substantially lower then the 3% he'd predicted. Also comparable economies such as Germany and the US have been growing at 1-2% a year, every year for the past 5 years. The UK on the other hand has been in recession for much of the past four years. So although there has been a sharp rebound in 2014 the UK has actually experienced much less economic growth and is in fact just beginning to make up the lost ground created by Osborne's austerity.

The biggest whopper of the day though was the claim that with unemployment at 1.6 million it is the lowest it has ever been. When Margret Thatcher took up office in 1979 unemployment was around 1.5 million and rapidly increased to around 3.5 million. Therefore if you believe that time began with Thatcher - as Osborne seems to - unemployment is still around 100,000 higher then it was 35 years ago.

Also that 1.6 million figure doesn't apply to the number of unemployed. Instead it applies to the number of people claiming unemployment benefit. A key feature of Osborne's aggressive social restructuring has been to make it much harder for anyone to claim unemployment benefit. I'm rather a useful example of this because although I'm no longer claiming any form of benefit I am not what you would describe as traditionally employed.

Added to people like me there's been an extra 1 million people who have been moved onto so-called "zero-hour contracts." These are contracts where you don't actually do any work or get paid but you are officially under contract with an employer so you're not technically unemployed. Then of course there are all the people who've been encouraged to become self-employed. Again as they're employing themselves these people aren't unemployed but many of them are earning far below the minimum wage and economically would probably be better off if they took up subsistence farming.

Therefore the actual UK unemployment figure is probably closer to 3 million and may even match Thatcher's peak.

In order to demonstrate how amazingly successful his economic miracle has been Osborne then proceeded to hand out a series of pre-election bribes. For example the tax on tobacco was frozen while the taxes on alcohol and fuel were cut. The biggest bribe is probably a government grant that will give prospective house buyers 25% of their deposit.

Osborne of course would like you to think that these giveaways are the fruits of the economic recovery he has produced. In reality he's simply paid for it by hiking up a tax on bank balance sheets. Although it is hard to complain about increased taxes on banks this seems reckless. The financial crash was caused by banks not maintaining large enough balance sheets with money instead being shifted onto bonuses and bad loans. By only taxing the balance sheets rather then say bonuses and loans Osborne is encouraging banks to again shrink their balance sheets in order to avoid this tax.

One thing I did find interesting about the speech was the constant focus on the north of England which Osborne kept referring to as "The Northern Powerhouse." This was purely political because Labour who were traditionally the party of the working class have now become the party of minorities who are tithed to businesses such as housing associations owned by Labour's millionaire members.

As a result white working class voters in the north of England particularly in places such as Rochdale have started to shift allegiance from a Labour party that has abandoned them to the UK Independence Party (UKIP). So by focusing on the north of England the Conservatives are clearly hoping to take advantage of a Labour/UKIP vote split in order to win seats that have traditionally been no-go zones for them.

20:30 on 18/3/15 (UK date).