Con-servative George Osborne isn't fooling anyone - he's quashed the aspirations of millions

Up to his old tricks: Osborne is giving with one hand, but taking with the other

Nothing is as good as it seems with Con-servative Chancellor George Osborne.
The living wage of £7.20 an hour from next year  is below the £7.85 rate outside London that experts calculate is needed now to survive.
The £9 by 2020 is less than the £9.15 needed now in London because of higher rents and other costs.
And the level is based on workers receiving the tax credits and other benefits the Treasury axeman is cutting.
The astute Resolution Foundation reckoned that £9.15 needs to soar to £11.65 when in-work social security payments are withdrawn.

So Osborne giving with one hand and taking with the other is an old Treasury trick.
I repeatedly criticised Labour’s target of the hiking the minimum wage to “at least” £8 by 2019 as pathetic but tax credits would make it worth more than that. Osborne’s £9 would be devalued.
Chairman Osborne and his Maoist two-kids policy - unless your rich - is a Budget that will crumble over the next few hours and days once the real detail is found in Treasury documents.

The big winners are companies on state benefits who’ll pocket another 2% corporation tax cut.
HSBC, a bank tarnished by tax avoidance, is licking its lips at a profitable tax gift.
Osborne’s quashed the aspirations of millions of nurses, teachers, council workers, police officers, firefighters and members of the armed forces by limiting pay rises to just 1% every year.

Mirror readers tell their Budget stories

Our verdict: George is fooling no one

Scrapped maintenance grants for students from the poorest families weren’t “unfair”, as Osborne ludicrously claimed, but an aspiration ladder. A “problem” only the eyes of a wealthy Tory could see.
Grab a grant and win an inheritance tax cut is the indecent Tory politics of a Two Nation Chancellor.
And then there there is that freeze and cuts to in-work benefits - the £30-billion that puts food on the table and pays the electricity bills.
The idiocy of Osborne claiming Namibia’s roads are better than Britain’s exposed the shallowness of this Budget.
Rebranding failure on economic growth, deficit reductio