Who Was George Osborne Trying to Bribe with Yesterday's Vote Chasing Budget?

In his final budget before the election, George Osborne was a man very obviously jiggling every lever on the UK economy in order to make it cough up a few more votes.

This instinctive Machiavelli understands that half of winning is figuring out how you succeed, and the other half is figuring out how to make your opponents faceplant, hard, into a rake. So there was plenty of blunting Labour's guns, plus bungs all over: bungs for the young on houses, bungs for the old on pensions, bungs for drunks, even bungs for history buffs.

Who exactly is George buying-off here? Will they even be bought off? Here's our analysis of the key bribes from Budget 2015

WHAT'S THE BREAK?
The government certainly won't spoon money down your neck if you want an education. But if you'd like to prop up a housing bubble? Open a "Help-To-Buy ISA" and for every £200 you put away, the state will match it with £50. The aim is to encourage more of those famous "first-time buyers" to join the frenzied Ponzi-scheme of Homeowner Britain. The more people who pack into Homeowner Britain, the more voters have an incentive to vote for the party who want to bail out whatever financial institutions made the latest batch of unaffordable crappy loans.

WHAT'S IT DOING HERE?
Helping keep Britain's money supply flowing uphill towards the door of the three biggest landowners in the country. When everyone is paying £300,000 a month to live in the same rain-sodden portakabin outside Barnet, the three will be said to have "won" the game, and only then can we reset the counter on asset-ownership.

WHO IS IT PANDERING TO?
Generation Rent. Foxtons employees. People who want to lose a lot of money in a big property bubble.

ARE THERE ACTUALLY VOTES IN IT?
Yes, shitloads, though only until the bubble bursts. You know how people see footage of the Hindenburg airship disaster and they go "But how could they be so STUPID as to use Hydrogen in the balloon?"? This is the level of 20/20 hindsight that will be deployed in ten years time about the decision to "help" more and more people pile into a static housing supply via free money.

WHAT'S THE BREAK?
A penny off of beer and 2 percent off the price of cider.

WHO IS IT PANDERING TO?
Saloon bar Farage-ists who think the smoking ban is the first sign of civilisation's endgame. Pub landlords with such thin margins they probably deserve to go out of business. Some bloke in the press office of CAMRA. Pisscats, pissheads and pissed-up farts.

WHAT'S IT DOING HERE?
George Osborne has somehow become the first Chancellor in history to realise that people like cheap beer. It never occurred to any of his predecessors. Gordon Brown would regularly whack a couple of pence on the price of an Old Speckled Hen without even raising his eyebrows from the despatch box. It got so routine that he invented something called an "escalator" that would do it for him automatically: a kind of Wallace and Gromit device for whacking fresh tuppences on beer duty.

Clearly, after many months of brainstorming in the Treasury, someone got the red marker and the whiteboard and wrote "BEER = ££. SO £⬇️ = :-) ?". CAMRA says that as a result of this kind of lateral thinking, "16p has been knocked off the price of a pint since 2013". That's right: in an alternate universe, we'd be staring at the £4.66 pint right now. Scary.

ARE THERE ACTUALLY VOTES IN IT?
Pissed people generally make lousy voters: forgetful, emotional and uncoordinated.

WHAT'S THE BREAK?
£1 million for some celebrations to commemorate the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt.

WHO IS IT PANDERING TO?
Anti-French voters. English nationalist types. Military history buffs. Historical re-enactors. Lovers of Shakespeare. Plantagenets. Cartwrights. Blacksmiths. Millwrights. Stockade owners. Stockade renters.

WHAT'S IT DOING HERE?
Osborne seems to have blown £1 million to make a very nerdy politics joke about the SNP and the EU in his budget speech, when he gave the following description of the Battle Of Agincourt: "It is also when a strong leader defeated an ill-judged alliance between the champion of a united Europe and a renegade force of Scottish Nationalists".

ARE THERE ACTUALLY VOTES IN IT?
Absolutely. A cool million for George to make a wink-y comparison between our present situation and a 600 year old squabble between two sets of related robber-barons seems like money well-spent, if you are George Osborne, and it isn't your personal money.

WHAT'S THE BREAK?
The North Sea Oil industry gets £1.3 billion in tax breaks, to shield it against a drop in the global oil price.

WHO IS IT PANDERING TO?
Oil magnates. People with shares in oil companies. Global warming denialists. The entire population of Aberdeen, who would be completely stuffed without it.

WHAT'S IT DOING HERE?
After years of being a cash cow that successive Chancellors from Geoffrey Howe onwards milked like they were evensong bell-ringers, North Sea Oil has become a victim of the global oversupply. On the one hand, the oil price falling means we get cheaper petrol at the pumps. On the other, we now have to pay £1.3 billion to stop various drilling companies from going bust. In other words, the net effect is pretty much back to zero.

ARE THERE ACTUALLY VOTES IN IT?
Nope. Scotland wouldn't give a shit about the Conservatives if George Osborne rented an ice cream van and went around the country on a Free Money And Blowjobs Tour. Which, effectively, he already is. If you divide £1.3 billion by the population of Aberdeen (200,000), you get a figure of £6,500: what we're spending for every man, woman and child there.

WHAT'S THE BREAK?
Old people used to pay a punitive 55 percent tax if they sold their pension in exchange for a cash lump sum. Now, you won't have to pay that, so you can sell it at 65, buy a Lambo with the proceeds, then top yourself when the money-pile gets used up by 72 and you're reduced to eating dog food. Everyone wins.

WHAT'S IT DOING HERE?
Stuffing more gold in the mouths of the Tories' electoral secret weapon: the grey vote. As we all know, pensioners vote more than any other social group, and it's not just their rinse that's blue. Osborne knows this only too well: he's spent five years patiently buttering-up the elderly. Unfortunately many of those he started buttering-up in 2010 won't be voting in 2015 for mortality reasons, but as Osborne knows, there's a certain amount of scrap in every job.

WHO IS IT PANDERING TO?
Old people who need Lambos. Lambo manufacturers. Dog food manufacturers.

ARE THERE ACTUALLY VOTES IN IT?
It feels like the sort of people who are cashing-in their annuities may not be either old enough or conservative enough to bother much with this. Really, it's the way he's groomed the elderly like geriophile with the pensions triple-lock and winter fuel allowance jumps, that will pay off.

@gavhaynes

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