Budget blog: "This is the Budget for voters - and vote Conservative"

In his final Budget before the general election in 50 days George Osborne did not fail to pull the last-minute vote-grabbing rabbits out of the hat.

Starting out with double mentions of how "Britain's walking tall again" and "we choose the future" (who wouldn't, given the choice?), the chancellor got another nifty soundbite in towards the end of his speech with his "10 pounds off a tank with the Tories" as he gleefully twisting the sword into Labour's fuel duty escalator (again) and announcing a fuel duty freeze (again).

And he ended it all with a line to bring a sense of national pride welling up inside even the least nationalistic voter: "The Budget for Britain - the comeback country!"

In the preceding hour or so Osborne trotted rather than galloped through the numbers that will help get his party re-elected, or otherwise, depending on your point of view.

"Road from austerity to prosperity"

Economic growth plodding along nicely at an average 2.3% over the next five years - this is Osborne's "road from austerity to prosperity", which he forecasts to finish a year earlier than planned.

He wasn't going to "abandon the plan and pursue the French approach", oh no. Indeed Britain apparently has the capacity to become Europe's economic powerhouse, overtaking Germany by 2030.

There will be plenty of voters who will doubtless feel less envious of Teutonic economic hegemony and turn away from UKIP now they think those continentals aren't taking all our jobs. But will they vote us out of Europe in a referendum and blow that lofty economic ambition out of the water?

There was also a sombre nod (there always is) to rising global economic risks and the need for vigilance - particularly that "a disorderly Greek exit from the euro remains the most serious risk to the UK economy".

Getting back to the feelgood factor was the Macmillan-esque "you've never had it so good" element of the speech. Osborne told us that living standards are up in 2015 compared with 2010, as measured by the amount of disposable income available per household. Indeed it's up £900 a year. Plus unemployment is down "a whole 3 percentage points from the rate we inherited from the last government" and that this a "truly national recovery".

Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but while they were waiting expectantly for the call to work, were the hundreds of thousands of people on zero-hours contracts watching Osborne and wistfully wishing they had an extra £900 to spend on non-essentials each year?

Unfortunately for them, they are not going to get any more help from the State. They are going to get less, because the structural deficit must come down.

"Today, the OBR confirm that [the structural deficit] now stands at less than half of the deficit we inherited" (there's the political dig he's become famous for in his Budget speeches). "But at 5% this year, it's still far too high - and it must come down. With our plan it does. The deficit falls to 4% in 2015-16; then down to 2% the following year; and down again to 0.6% the year after that."

So, while the economy goes up, up and away to surpass the heady heights of the Teutonic model, the deficit goes down, down, down - by cutting public services and welfare. The plan involves slashing another £13 billion from government departmental budgets, raising £5 billion via tackling tax evasion and £12 billion from further welfare savings. George would likely argue that with all this full-time work around, the last-named will take care of itself.

Hammering the banks

Of course the banks received another vote-friendly hammering - the bank levy goes up to 0.21% a year, raising an extra £900 million, and while finance directors are choking over that, they'd better recast those tax returns to strip out fines for misdemeanours such as PPI as being deductible for corporation tax purposes. Nice surreptitious vote-winner.

But don't you find it odd that the proper vote-grabbers get left to the last five minutes or so? I'm sure I'm not alone in bleeding from the eyeballs just a bit as I sat glued to the monitor at around the 45-minute mark. But, just as he did last year, George left his gorgeous bits until last - maybe because those who stayed the distance will remember them longest.

Note also that he did the bit about reducing the lifetime pension allowance to £1 million somewhere in the middle of the speech along with a yawn-enducing mention of modifying deeds of variation for inheritance tax purposes (which was actually a dig at Ed Miliband).

Anyway back to the vote-catchers: there's going to be something that's sure to be called a HISA (if you say it with a posh accent it sounds quite fitting, and funnier than a NISA), where first-time homebuyers can contribute up to £200 a month into a Help to Buy ISA and get an extra 25% from Gov until it reaches £12,000. Sounds generous, but the reality is that the Treasury will probably claw most of that back in stamp duty as demand for scarce property soars.

Vote-winner number two is a clever ruse - you need to vote George & Co back into power to get the opportunity to qualify for the Personal Savings Allowance. From April 2015 you'll pay no tax on the first £1,000 of your savings interest if you're a basic-rate taxpayer, but higher-rate taxpayers are also catered for - they can get £500 in interest before tax becomes due.

So that's a £200 annual giveaway for anyone paying basic-rate tax who happens to have about 72 grand sitting in the best-paying easy-access account. I think we know which demographic he's going for here.

Number three is for all those pensioners who feel they have been muscled into buying a poor-paying annuity before pensions freedom was announced last April. Vote Conservative and maybe, just maybe, you'll be able to sell that pup on to some other poor sucker (frankly, the life company who sold it to you is not likely to want it back - this would be like taking a second-hand car back to the dealer who sold it to you two weeks previously).

Realistically the plan as it stands is unlikely to see the light of day and will be quietly shelved - although Ros Altmann's idea to determine a cash value for an annuity in exchange for old-age care costs is very commendable.

But vote-winner number four on the personal savings front is a fantastic idea - how many people have been studiously saving in their ISA only to find that an unexpected cash call leaves them with a short-term cashflow problem? I know I have - but from the autumn you can withdraw what you need from your ISA, and as long as you put it back in the same tax year you won't lose the ISA entitlement.

I'm looking forward to seeing what forms ISA providers devise to track all of this. It will need to be an HMRC-approved form that tracks the money out and in, and potentially from one provider to another. Oh joy - just what they need on top of the merged cash and stocks and shares ISA allowance, and transfers from child trust funds to Junior ISAs.

All-in-all, if you ignore the important stuff, this was political theatre at its best, and rather than ending with "this is the Budget for Britain, the comeback country" perhaps a more truthful sign-off might have been "this is the Budget for Voters, and vote Conservative".

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