Political Editor Chris Lloyd watches George Osborne deliver a Budget with little flashes of inspiration against the relentlessly grey economic clouds

GEORGE OSBORNE’S rhyming buzzphrase yesterday was “aspiration nation”. He said he was going to light the fires of the people’s ambition. He said he was going to fulfil the population’s dreams. He proclaimed that he was presenting a Budget for an aspiration nation.

But the figures in his Budget were illustrative of a different alliterative nation: becalmed Britain is marooned and motionless.

Growth in our country is further curtailed; borrowing has been stuck at its high level for at least three years; our debt is not going to peak until 2017; cutbacks in our kingdom will continue even beyond that.

We are stranded.

For all that, at first glance, Mr Osborne’s Budget was far better than last year’s “omnishambles” which led to rapid U-turns on pasties, caravans and grannies, and which left a poisonous political cloud concerning the cut in the top earners’ rate of income tax.

In fact, there was far more in yesterday’s Budget than we had been led to expect.

For instance, the welcome and imaginative measure that could help people afford to buy new properties – a Help to Buy scheme that must echo Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy of the 1980s. This, in turn, is aimed at boosting the beleaguered construction sector.

For businesses, extremely welcome measures included a cut in corporation tax and a reduction in National Insurance contributions.

North-East businesspeople have long complained that NI is a “tax on jobs”, because the more people they take on, the more they have to pay in NI contributions. Mr Osborne hopes this tax cut will encourage small businesses, in particular, to take on workers.

And Liberal Democrats welcomed his announcement that the threshold at which people start to pay income tax is to be raised to £10,000 in April next year.

This has been the Lib Dems’ number one priority.

It means that 2.7 million of the lowest paid workers – the majority of them women – will not have to pay tax, and it provides a useful tax cut for 24 million other working people.

The Lib Dems will use this as proof that their presence in the Conservative-dominated coalition is having some positive effect.

It is interesting, though, that Mr Osborne’s Budget should give the Lib Dems something to cheer, because dyed-in-the-wool Tories may well be muttering into their slightly-cheaper beer.

Because Mr Osborne’s Budget, for all its eyecatching baubles, did not present a big idea that is going to change the economic weather that has caused the British economy to be so stubbornly stagnant. Growth is stagnantly low, debt is stagnantly high, and even the people are becomingly stagnantly gloomy – public sector workers were told that their wages are to stagnate now until 2016.

TRADITIONAL Tories are beginning to say that because Mr Osborne’s Plan A programme of cuts is not having the desired effect, there should be a Plan B of far deeper public spending cuts and correspondingly deep tax cuts.

By-elections from Middlesbrough to Eastleigh have shown that the UK Independence Party is voicing these right-wing concerns with increasing success, and yesterday party leader Nigel Farage said that his Plan B would “cut spending far more radically” and “much tougher” than anything the coalition is implementing.

There is an alternative Plan B espoused by Labour, whose leader Ed Miliband was, strange to say, on blistering form in the House of Commons yesterday.

Although Labour can’t say precisely where the extra money would come from, it would like to spend far more on infrastructure – such as roads, schools, railways. This would provide more jobs, get money moving around the country, and stimulate greater growth.

There is a sneaking suspicion that Mr Osborne would like to do more in this direction.

He has clearly been ramming his hand down every sofa in Whitehall where he has found £3bn in “underspend” which, he announced yesterday, is to be spent on infrastructure.

However, we’ll have to wait until June for the details and until next year to see the colour of his magic money.

ALTHOUGH he might like to do more, Mr Osborne knows that £3bn isn’t very much, not in the context of the Government’s annual £745bn spending.

Just like a penny off a £3 pint isn’t very much. Just like the measures to boost sales of newly-built houses which still leave 85 per cent of the construction sector still be stuck in the doldrums.

Mr Osborne has pinned his colours to the mast of his Plan A. Even though he admitted that the plan is not working as effectively as he hoped, it would now be too politically embarrassing for him to change tack and adopt either of the competing Plan Bs on the horizon.

He is as becalmed as the rest of Britain, hoping that the squalls from the eurozone do not drive us onto the rocks and that his tinkering can somehow provide us with a little forward momentum by the time of the 2015 election.

Those are his aspirations for a stagnation nation.