The Osborne Files: Britain’s Mr. Austerity Goes Socialist

George Osborne, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, has been called many things since 2010, when he turned the United Kingdom into a petri dish for his experiment in austerity economics: arrogant, incompetent, supercilious, right-wing, cruel, antediluvian, deluded. Until now, though, nobody has described him as a socialist.

Let me be the first. Yesterday, in his annual budget presentation to the House of Commons, a desperate (there’s another frequently applied adjective) Osborne launched a scheme to socialize a significant portion of the U.K. mortgage market. Taking his cue from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, those two great American bastions of state socialism, he said that the U.K. government would enter the mortgage business, lending British homebuyers up to a fifth of the cost of newly-constructed houses and guaranteeing the mortgages of people who are struggling to raise enough cash for a down payment. Hitherto, mortgage finance in the U.K., unlike in the United States, has been exclusively a private-sector business. Now, Osborne, a self-described apostle of Adam Smith and Margaret Thatcher, has decided to change all that.

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