Watching Gordon Brown’s fantasy Budgets often felt like consuming a large dish of soused herrings — sour, vinegary, and more chewy protein than was palatable.

By comparison, George Osborne’s first effort was chocolate cake topped with whipped cream and strawberries. Given the differences between them, you might think it should be the other way around.

No! Osborne satisfied our despairing appetite for realism, honesty and a massive aspiration for a healthy, self-funding economy in the medium term. How we enjoyed every cut-throat word of it.

Despite his detractors in the City and the media, Osborne’s reputation is made. This Budget will be remembered even more than Geoffrey Howe’s pitch perfect 1981 effort — in which he defied 364 top economists to return the country to growth within a year — simply because, in scale and in enterprise, it tops it by a mile.

The structural deficit will be eliminated by 2014, producing a surplus that will begin the long haul of lowering the UK’s massive stock of public debt. Under Osborne’s strict rule, it will top off at 70% of GDP, not the expected 100% from Labour’s deficit halving plans.

This is serious stuff. It will need reductions in departmental spending of up to 25% across the public sector — apart from Health and International Development. The latter, of course, are political choices not economic ones. Any half competent economist can spot the waste littering these inefficient agencies of the State. I am sure they are marked down for major surgery in the Conservatives’ second Parliament — minus the Lib Dems, perhaps.

One thing I enjoy about this hybrid administration is the zeal with which it scraps anything that has Gordon Brown’s stamp on it. Out goes the FSA, the laughable “Golden Rules”, hugely complex benefit mountains, and, as we’ll hear in the autumn spending review, much of Brown’s cretinous agenda for public sector dominance of personal behaviour.

Brown must wonder why he bothered to build such a vast top-down infrastructure of command and control, especially as all that treasure spent didn’t win him his coverted General Election victory. The Tories are clearly intent on total ruthlessness where corrupt Scottish Labour politics are concerned.

The question we have to ask is why our democratic processes didn’t protect the nation against the mafia-like tactics of Gordon Brown, Mandelson and the rest of New Labour’s despicable crew.

Osborne’s Budget gives us hope that we will never see their like again.

Speculation is rife that the social democrat contingent in the Lib Dems, led by Charlie Kennedy, could split away from the Coalition. I don’t see that happening for a year or two, at least until Labour starts getting decent polling results under a new leader. Harriet Harman is planting the seeds of that move furiously. It could happen within this Parliament.

Nick Clegg and the genuine Liberals may even unite with the Tories to form a real Liberal Conservative Party. His loyalty so far suggests that this could be a return to the old Conservative dominance of British politics for decades to come.

John Evans

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