George Osborne, David Cameron’s “Austerity Chancellor” and the anti-Brexit campaign’s “Scaremonger-General” in 2016, believes the next British election is “Labour’s to lose” as the Conservative government gives the appearance of having lost control of multiple crises.
George Osborne, born Gideon Osborne, the eldest son of a wealthy baronet, was infamous as Chancellor of the Exchequer during the austerity era after the Conservatives returned to office in 2010, slashing Britain’s armed forces, police forces, and criminal justice system — while somehow finding funds to greatly increase European Union budget contributions and foreign aid — and as the “scaremonger-general” of the campaign to Remain in the European Union, issuing the public with a series of now heavily discredited threats of immediate economic calamity if they dared to vote for Brexit.
Regarded as a natural ally of politicians like Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and, in particular, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, not least because the latter is proposing a similar austerity agenda for Britons as they are crushed by inflation and energy crises — although, in fairness to Osborne, he cut taxes while Hunt is increasing the tax burden to its heaviest since the Second World War — it will have caused some consternation in Downing Street when he told Channel 4 that, in fact, the Sunak administration appears to have lost control of events, and the next election is now Labour’s to lose.
“Since Rishi Sunak’s claim to government is competence, he and his ministers need to diffuse all these different issues,” Osborne said.
“The queues — things like passports, driving licences — that is out there every day in people’s daily experience. It really annoys,” he explained.
“It’s an enormous daily frustration. There’s the strikes not just on the railways, we’ve got a nurses’ strike coming up.
“We’ve got the problems of the [climate change] protesters on the roads, we’ve got the [thousands of illegal immigrants travelling on] small boats.
“There’s a general sense that the Government is not in control of events and that’s so dangerous for a government,” he said.
One area where Osborne might have praised the current government is its more or less open endorsement of net migration on a grand scale, now confirmed to have smashed a record-breaking half-million a year in the latest official estimates.
Osborne himself ran on an election platform of cutting net migration “from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands” in both 2010 and 2015, but after Brexit terminated his political career he boasted openly that the Tory leadership never intended to keep this promise and privately opposed it, urging then-Prime Minister Theresa May to drop it altogether.
She chose to repeat the pledge going into the 2017 election — although like Cameron and Osborne before her did not keep it — but Osborne’s long-time foe Boris Johnson did finally abandon it, instead offering a much vaguer pledge of at least some overall reduction in the annual influx.
Obviously, he did not keep even this much weaker promise, given last year’s record-breaking influx, and Rishi Sunak has given every indication that immigration will, if anything, only further increase under his government, telling business leaders that he thinks the public can be appeased on legal mass migration if he can at least give the appearance of doing something about illegal mass migration.
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