LABOUR leader Harriet Harman was correct to point out in reply to George Osborne’s Budget speech that the Chancellor constantly plays politics as part of his campaign to move next door.

Osborne takes pleasure in appropriating the opposition’s slogans, weaving “government for working people,” “fairness,” “one nation” and “Britain needs a pay rise” into his diatribe justifying the Tories’ ongoing transfer of wealth from poor to rich.

His cynicism reached its apotheosis when he pretended to have adopted the concept of a compulsory national living wage.

The Chancellor’s supposed living wage will be introduced next April at just £7.20 an hour — only for over-25s — a mere 50p above the level to which the minimum wage will be raised in October.

The Living Wage Foundation assesses the living wage currently at £7.85 an hour outside London and £9.15 in it.Osborne’s devious trick certainly falls into what Harman calls “his political traps, games and tactics,” but it also exposes the conservatism of the Labour opposition, given that its election pledge offered a minimum wage level of only £8 an hour by 2020.

When a viscerally right-wing Chancellor is capable of outflanking Labour from the left, something is seriously wrong.

Harman’s response to Osborne repeated the same austerity-lite approach laid down by former shadow chancellor Ed Balls and which landed both Labour and Balls in the mire on May 7.

Supporting a pay freeze for low-paid public-sector workers and a benefits cap won’t encourage people at the sharp end that Labour is on their side.

Green MP Caroline Lucas is justified in calling Osborne’s emergency Budget “cruel and counterproductive.”

Her reference to the government’s “already stained record on climate change” is strengthened by Osborne’s freeze on fuel duty and reduction of vehicle excise duty for older, more polluting cars.

It beggars belief that the Chancellor can mouth the words “fair” and “government for working people” when he orders a 1 per cent maximum annual pay rise for public-sector workers and a freeze on working-age benefits for the life of this parliament.

Reducing the current £26,000 benefits cap to £23,000 in London and £20,000 outside will cause dire hardship and lead to many more evictions for families unable to afford their rent.

Such indifference to human suffering, delivered as ever with Osborne’s sardonic grin morphing into a sneer, is typical of a generation of rich Tories who understand class war and wage it with a vengeance.

They portray cuts in personal tax-free allowances and increases in the higher tax band in terms of their effect on people at the lower end, yet the real cash bonanza is for the most highly paid.

For all his “worker” claptrap, Osborne and his colleagues are in office to do a job for their own class.

That’s why, along with income tax changes, corporation tax will be further trimmed from 20 per cent to 19 per cent in 2017 and 18 per cent in 2020, why taxation on dividends is to be cut and why inheritance tax that affects only the top 5 per cent of estates will be relaxed.

The anger and despair that many people, in work or unemployed, will experience because of this vicious and despicable Budget must be turned into action.

It cannot be left to MPs, most of whom see this conflict as a political game.

Mobilisation in trade unions, community action and the People’s Assembly Against Austerity is essential to take on the Tory attacks and defeat them.