Osborne slams "totally dishonest" Budget

At the 2009 Spring Forum, George Osborne condemned Alistair Darling’s Budget as being “totally dishonest” and “disastrous”.

The Shadow Chancellor said Labour should have used the Budget to “set out a credible and serious plan” to deal with the Debt Crisis.

But he stressed that, instead, "what we got was a fiction based on a fantasy”:

“The fiction that government can delay the hard decisions on spending until after the general election – based on the fantasy that the Prime Minister who promised he’d ended boom and bust is now going to take us straight back from bust to boom.”

George said the Budget showed Labour have “run out of ideas”:

“They borrowed and they borrowed, and they never stopped. They should have fixed the roof while the sun was shining. Instead they stored up debts that will take a generation to pay off. And now they have reached a dead end.”

George promised a Conservative Government would scrap Labour’s national insurance tax rise on the incomes of everyone earning £20,000.

And he warned, “We must act and act fast. We need a government of thrift in this age of austerity.”