Budget 2015: George Osborne announces the triumph of Blairism

1. Successful governments shift the centre ground. Attlee forced the Conservatives to accept the welfare state; Thatcher forced Labour to accept the free market; Blair forced the Conservatives to accept non-selective state schools and gay equality.

Yesterday, George Osborne capitulated to more of the New Labour “settlement”, as he didn’t quite call it.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, the Tories opposed a low minimum wage because it would cost jobs. Yesterday, Osborne announced a high minimum wage despite the Office for Budget Responsibility’s estimate that it would cost 60,000 jobs.

And he finally acted on the rhetoric of the early Blair to impose a limit on the number of children eligible for public support. One of the strands of Blair’s pitch before 1997 was strong families and right imposing responsibilities, but it was overtaken in office by the setting of a target for reducing child poverty that could be met in the short run only by huge cash transfers. Blair never resolved that contradiction, complaining bitterly about Gordon Brown’s expensive tax credits without accepting that they were the only way to meet the targets he had set. Yesterday, Osborne resolved it in Blair’s favour over Brown.

Osborne’s two-child limit doesn’t apply to children born before April 2017 – a lot of the Budget measures were announcements nearly two years in advance – and it applies only to tax credits and Universal Credit (which still, five years after its launch, hardly exists). But it is a big structural change and marks the delayed triumph of Blairism.

2. I have done my What George Osborne Said And What He Meant for The Independent today. One thing I didn’t have space for is to comment on how long it has taken Osborne to fulfil his promise to cut inheritance tax, first made to put Gordon Brown off calling a snap election in 2007. Ten years later, he is finally going to achieve a modest increase in the threshold, limited to the family home.

3. Well worth reading: Hopi Sen on how Osborne has accepted the Fiscally Responsible Labour case for gentler deficit reduction. Another way in which the Tories have accommodated to the New Labour settlement, but because Miliband and Balls “cast him as an iron chancellor, relentless in pursuit of cruel austerity”, Osborne was able to pose as the warrior for prudence against Labour recklessness.

And also Stephen Daisley on Liz Kendall, the only candidate for the Labour leadership with any chance of contesting the New Labour settlement and taking it back from Osborne, the likely Tory leader at the next election.