If I were George Osborne I’d be starting to sweat about Tory unpopularity | Martin Kettle

Even in a favourable political and economic climate, the British people don’t love the Conservatives

Three weeks ago, voters in Ireland went to the polls. The results were inconclusive. An incumbent government was punished for its austerity policies. But the voters declined to hand power either to the previous governing party, which had bankrupted the economy in the first place, or to a collection of left-talking parties whose rhetoric some voters seemed to like but whose programmes most seemed not to trust. And there things rest. Today, Ireland is still looking for a government.

As Ireland’s political class scratched their heads at what the voters had meant by all this, the columnist Fintan O’Toole wrote a piece in the Irish Times that cut through the confusion. The voters, he said, had essentially said they didn’t believe the story the political class had been telling them. They had not consented to the morality tale of “harsh austerity for the little people and astonishing generosity to bondholders” that has been imposed on Ireland, and many other countries, since 2008. Instead they had voted, albeit in a very fragmented way, for a shift in favour of equality and a fairer use of resources. As the headline on O’Toole’s article put it: “The winner of Election 2016 is social democracy.”

Related: George Osborne’s budget shows he is planning an early election | Tom Clark

This was a budget that revealed Osborne to be trapped by austerity too

Related: George Osborne is a Roman emperor indulged in all his follies and fads | Simon Jenkins

Continue reading...