Another dead-end Budget

My Budget day started outside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) as I joined colleagues from the Stop the War Coalition to deliver a letter to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, calling for no more military intervention.

The 10 years in Iraq and 12 years in Afghanistan have cost British taxpayers almost £30 billion and left both countries devastated and impoverished.

As ever, I had hoped for a Budget that seriously addressed the imbalance of military spending compared to civil needs at home and abroad.

I moved across the road to join the PCS union members on picket line duty outside Parliament.

PCS members have suffered enormous job losses, frozen pay, privatisation and increased workload in almost every department.

They are understandably angry and I joined a few other MPs on their picket lines as a gesture of solidarity.

I reflected that for all of the Chancellor's rhetoric, none of his policies, plans or services are possible without public-sector workers and civil servants.

PCS is doing a great job in promoting a different set of Budget criteria in its research papers.

I crossed back over the road to Old Palace Yard and joined others in holding CND placards demonstrating that the £100bn planned on Trident could be better spent on health, housing and education.

Later I watched the Budget on screen, and I reflected on how it can be that noisy MPs think they are doing their public image good, when in reality they make the House of Commons just sound raucous and ill-informed.

George Osborne opened his speech with essentially a declaration of Tory philosophy - ie he wanted a low-tax, high-profit, "aspirational" economy. I reflected on the poverty of so many people in both my own community and around the country where a quarter of young people are not in work or are being grossly exploited on workfare schemes.

I saw evidence of just how out of touch Osborne is on Tuesday night when I attended a very angry public meeting in my constituency of Islington, protesting about the benefit cap and the cuts and, to our horror, news that over 1,000 Islington children are affected by the benefit cap. It is estimated that half of those will lose between £50 and £200 per week.

Many schools are faced with children having to leave the borough, as their families can no longer be housed in affordable accommodation.

Also that day I was one of 50 MPs who voted against the Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill 2012/13.

This Bill would enable jobcentres to force unemployed people to take unpaid work in factories and supermarkets around the country.

The message from this is that employers can get away with paying workers nothing. The best line I saw on Twitter was about Poundland - "everything here is worth a pound, except the staff."

But as Osborne delivered his speech, he warmed to his theme, declaring that he had inherited a "bloated welfare system" and that what happened in Cyprus was a warning to us all.

I don't think he appreciated the irony of this point. The people of Cyprus revolted against the theft of savings from their accounts and the banking plan was dropped after just three days of protests.

Osborne then went on to give some rather fanciful predictions for rates of growth from 2015 onwards, claiming that borrowing was falling and would continue to fall - without being able to produce much evidence.

The Chancellor claimed that his Budget was fiscally neutral, but failed to mention that tax cuts actually make the poor worse off, as services and benefits are also cut.

He went on to announce that the 1 per cent public-sector pay rise cap would be extended and that there would be an end to progression pay for long service and merit in the public sector.

The Chancellor failed to mention anything about defence expenditure, except that the armed forces on the front line would not have their pay frozen and that the Libor scandal fines would go toward military welfare.

His much-vaunted infrastructure programme includes big investments in railways and roads, but while claiming to be environmentally sensitive he has once again frozen fuel duties, thus encouraging more car use. He has also provided huge tax relief for shale gas fracking and, suspiciously, on the decommissioning of oil and gas rigs. This may be a way of later bringing in tax relief on nuclear decommissioning thus subsidising nuclear power.

His final flourish was on taxation, where business taxes will become among the lowest in Europe.

His expenditure on new housing will be directed towards middle-class housing developments, with no investment in council housing for fixed rents.

As expected, it's a Tory Budget that will do nothing to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor in Britain.

My friend Grahame Morris MP tweeted that the Budget was nothing but a wealth transfer to the rich, and Diane Abbott ironically asked that if a million euros can be taken by plane to Cyprus, why not millions by plane (I would say Overground) to Hackney?

Ed Miliband's response was cautious and he spent too much time talking about the loss of Britain's triple-A rating. When I see unemployment, fear, misery and poverty for the most vulnerable people in Britain, I realise more strongly than ever that we need a Labour alternative that focuses on equality and real security through jobs and a proper welfare state.

• Jeremy Corbyn is Labour MP for Islington North.