Osborne goes to war

The Office for Budget Responsibility yesterday forecast total government spending will fall to just 35.2 per cent of GDP in 2019-20 – the lowest level for 80 years.

Just 40 per cent of the spending cuts needed have been made so far, with the remaining 60 per cent to come in the next five years.

We are facing an extraordinary cavernous financial hole which yesterday's razzmatazz around the politically popular budget rather glossed over

BBC reporter Norman Smith 

In a broadcast on Radio 4 at 6.10am, Mr Smith said the OBR's documents read like a 'boom of doom', setting out the 'utterly terrifying' scale of the way spending will have to be 'hacked back' to 1930s levels.

'That is an extraordinary concept. You are back to the land of the Road To Wigan Pier, Mr Smith said.

George Orwell's bleak book, the Road To Wigan Pier, chronicled poverty, hunger and social injustice in the north of England in the 1930s.

He accused Mr Osborne of using positive growth forecasts as a 'fig leaf' to cover his 'embarrassment'.

And he suggested the Chancellor had used the 'razzmatazz' of stamp duty cuts and tax raids on banks and big business to gloss over an 'extraordinary cavernous financial hole'.

Today programme presenter John Humphrys added that someone listening to Mr Osborne's Commons statement yesterday 'did not go away with the sense of doom' Mr Smith had described.