The chancellor’s recent budget came as no surprise to those members of the public sceptical about Mr Osborne’s talk of ‘savings’ during the General Election.

But in a bizarre move, the chancellor intends making it ‘unlawful’ for governments to run budget deficits in ‘normal times’, whatever they are.

Some seventy-nine leading economists have backed a letter condemning the plan, and even the FT and The Economist have voiced criticism.

Despite this, the chancellor likes to draw parallels with household expenses, for example by comparing the state’s borrowing with an individual’s use of credit cards. But this is incredibly silly and wrong. Government can now borrow at very low interest rates. This is the time when the Government should be investing in infrastructure. Mr Osborne also asserts that the country should be ready for an uncertain future. But the Governor of the Bank of England has claimed that going for a big surplus will hold back growth.

However, the real reason for these attempts to produce a budget surplus is the very right-wing objective of this Government: to ‘shrink the state’.

The Government wants a country where the ultra-rich do not pay their fair share of taxes, where indirect taxes feature more than direct taxes and where public services suffer because of an obsessive desire to make the average citizen pay for the Government’s policies.

‘The Crash’ was caused by excessive private borrowing in the USA not public expenditure on this side of the Atlantic. People’s savings in British banks had to be safeguarded by British government funding.

It is high time that the Government’s obsession with the deficit was subjected to proper scrutiny and for their facile model of government finances as being the same as those of a household was spelt out as what it is intended to be: a cover for a massive redistribution of wealth and income from the overwhelming majority of the population to those who are already very well off indeed.

David Beere

Colin Crescent, Colindale