ED MILIBAND’S assaults on the Tories are always more effective when he goes for the jugular, as he did in the Budget debate by savaging a “trust fund Chancellor and a Bullingdon Club Prime Minister.”

This is not a case of playing the man not the ball. It is simply that the privileged backgrounds of George Osborne and David Cameron provide the material basis for their attitudes and beliefs.

Osborne’s speech contained personalised gibes at Miliband to portray him as privileged and out of touch with normal people.

Talk about pots and kettles. The Tories and Liberal Democrats have pushed through a five-year campaign cosseting their own class and driving working people into ever-deepening hardship.

The Office for National Statistics has exposed the reality that most people are suffering lower living standards now than at the beginning of this Parliament.

Yet Osborne tried to brazen through a new per capita measure of assessing income which combines low wages with the wealthy minority’s huge rewards to show that everyone is better off under the Tories.

He made much of raising the basic tax threshold to spare the lowest-paid from any income tax liability.

But as welcome as this may be for the working poor, its real benefit belongs to those on higher tax bands who gain considerably more than workers at the bottom of the pile.

A word of caution too is required for when Tory camp-follower Nick Clegg boasts of the coalition removing the burden of taxation from the low-paid.

The poorest 10 per cent of households in Britain are not exempt from taxes. Indeed, they pay an average of 47 per cent of their gross income in taxation — mainly indirect taxes such as VAT.

This is in contrast to the 35 per cent paid by the richest 10 per cent, which should put to bed once and for all the “all in it together” claptrap.

Miliband made a valid point in recalling that Osborne and company denied before the last general election that they would raise VAT and then promptly reneged on the pledge once they were in office.

The Chancellor’s speech may have been billed as the introduction to the Budget debate, but, in fact, it was the opening salvo of the general election campaign.

Osborne claimed that his plan has worked and that “Britain is walking tall again,” with faster growth than any major economy.

This must be news to China where annual growth has slipped to about three times that of this country.

But, leaving that aside, the Chancellor must know the falsity of his employment claims where jobless figures have fallen largely through zero-hours contracts and supposed self-employment.

Big business representatives understand which side their bread is buttered.

From income tax cuts, especially for the elite, reductions in corporation tax and petroleum revenue tax and a promised review of business rates, they know that Osborne is batting for them.

They will be unmoved by the savage public-spending cuts that the Chancellor flagged up in recent weeks but couldn’t be bothered to mention in the House.

Osborne’s ongoing assault on the public sector, NHS and state benefits will be concentrated on the working class, especially the working poor and welfare claimants, if the Tories win the general election, with or without Liberal Democrat collaborators.

Preventing that disastrous scenario must be the foremost goal for the labour movement and all progressives.