Autumn Statement: George Osborne twisted – and turned into his old foe Gordon Brown

George Osborne’s transformation into Gordon Brown, whom he opposed, derided and disliked, is now complete. Last week’s Autumn Statement was a Brownite event. The statement, which had been a minor tidying-up exercise, was turned by Brown into a big parliamentary event, a second Budget for the Chancellor, who doesn’t get many big Commons moments.

Much of the content last week was reminiscent of Brown: the emphasis on work, responsibility and social justice. Many of the devices were familiar too: the stealth taxes, the slogans, the theatrical surprises and the jokes. Although Osborne’s best joke was spontaneous, when he picked up the copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book that John McDonnell, the shadow Chancellor, had chucked across the despatch box: “Look – it’s his own personal signed copy.”

Another way in which Osborne imitates Brown, though, is his refusal to acknowledge unhelpful facts. Who can forget the contortions that Brown would go through in 2009 to avoid using the word “cuts” when setting out the changes in public spending that he planned?

Similarly, Osborne failed to publish what I call the “chart of everything” with his July Budget or with his statement last week. The chart is a summary of the effect of all the Chancellor’s measures on groups of the population ranked by income. It is a simple visual check on whether the decisions take or give more to the rich or poor. For every Budget and Autumn Statement under the coalition, the charts showed – just – that the richest fifth of the population bore the greatest burden.

So when the chart was missing in July, it should have been clear that the poor were being hit harder than the better-off. This wasn’t immediately obvious from Osborne’s speech, because the national living wage was more of a surprise than the cuts to tax credits, and attracted more attention on the day. The Brownite spin worked. When the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) produced its own version of the chart of everything the next day, it became clear how hard people on low incomes – many of them in work – would be hit. But by then the commentary had moved on.

The spin didn’t work for long, though. Over time it became better known that three million working families were going to lose an average of nearly £1,000 a year, despite the higher minimum wage, until eventually the Government was defeated in the House of Lords last month.

The depressing thing, though, is that secrecy works for a while.

Last week, Osborne did it again. Yes, he made an embarrassing U-turn on tax credits, but he was going to do something bad and now he wasn’t, so that was good, wasn’t it?

Well, it was better in the short term, but there was still no chart of everything. Therefore, despite warm words about “social justice” and “progressive government”, we knew that the Chancellor was still hitting the poor harder than the rich. We just didn’t know by how much.

And so it turned out. When the IFS published its analysis on Thursday, it showed that people on low incomes would be hit just as hard after four years as they would have been before the U-turn. But commentary had moved on, and Friday’s front pages were all about Labour’s straight-talking, honest politics over Syria.

It is progress that the cuts to tax credits have been cancelled, but the plan is to move claimants on to Universal Credit over the next four years. Their income will be protected initially, but the cuts that Osborne wanted to make next year will eventually be phased in.

I have my doubts about whether this will actually happen. Universal Credit still hardly exists. Only 3 per cent of benefit claimants are on it so far. If the roll-out speeds up and deep cuts to the incomes of the working poor are in prospect, the two things that last week’s Autumn Statement showed were (a) that public spending numbers are surprisingly flexible, and (b) that Osborne is sensitive to public opinion.

It is not much of a defence of our progressive, One Nation Chancellor, however, that he has published plans to take money away from hard-working people on low pay, but won’t carry them out, either because Universal Credit is a flop or because he’ll respond to the public outcry again. Or both.

Labour isn’t offering much by way of opposition at the moment, and the Red Book was a stunning misjudgement, but McDonnell made one good point in his reply to the Autumn Statement: the Chancellor got tax credits wrong because he made no attempt to understand the lives of those who are less fortunate than him. And he made his U-turn because his leadership ambitions were under threat, not because he had suddenly discovered how the other half lives.

Twitter.com/@JohnRentoul