WHENEVER I hear George Osborne deliver a Budget speech my mind wanders to some Bertie Wooster-inspired high jinks at the end of term in an expensive school, where bread rolls are thrown around and abuse is heaped on the one or two “scholarship” boys present. He cannot help himself! Throughout what ought to be a serious and quite detailed description of public finances, he has to throw in either unpleasant personal remarks about prominent Labour politicians or dole out sweets to Conservative MPs in highly marginal constituencies.

He endlessly boasts to a delighted array of Tory MPs that Britain is moving from austerity to prosperity and that freedom is purchased through more tax relief on Isa saving schemes and yet more cuts in corporation tax.

Osborne’s claims about economic growth are somewhat questionable, not least the assertion that the fall in the jobless rate is 5.3 per cent this year.

That masks two huge truths.

Wages have fallen due to the nearly one million people on zero-hours contracts and the unemployed and employed records deliberately ignore the very large number who are not in receipt of benefits due to sanctions imposed by the Department for Work and Pensions.

His claim that borrowing fell from £97 billion last year to £90bn this year and will be reduced to zero by 2018 is almost a reprise of what he said during the emergency Budget statement of June 2010.

The reality is that despite the massive cuts made in the last five years, the coalition has not made as many as it wished because of political opposition. Therefore it is offloading at least another £30bn cuts to government spending in the next parliament.

Osborne was proud of one thing. Spending as he described it on welfare had been cut by £21bn since he became Chancellor.

As he made this declaration in ringing tones to a packed House of Commons, my mind wandered to the homeless beggar I’d just seen outside a betting shop in my constituency, the foodbank queues all over the country and the horror with which many poor families face every school holiday when free meals are not available for their hungry children.

Osborne and his government haven’t a clue of the reality of poverty and desperation in modern Britain.

The Chancellor went on at great length about access to the internet and broadband speeds around the country and then, in a throwaway line, said the government would support local authorities in making sure wi-fi was available in libraries.

It’s probably a long time since George Osborne has been to a public library and, if he did, he may find it’s been closed and sold off for private- sector housing.

Essentially, the economic strategy is a race to the bottom with a low minimum wage, low corporation tax, low tax burdens on business and without any regard for the environmental consequences in continuing to lower fuel prices.

In his immediate reply after the budget Ed Miliband made some very strong points about the average income being £1,600 a year less, that the Tory party was the political arm of the hedge funds who escape any increased taxation in this budget and that a rise in VAT would almost certainly follow any new Conservative government if the Tories do win the election.

Miliband made the very strong point that Osborne had made massive cuts to local government spending and that Liverpool had lost 58 per cent of its government grant, opining that even Dick Turpin had the decency to wear a mask when he was robbing at such levels.

He went on to predict big cuts in the next three years should the Tories get back in and pointed out that in paragraph 2.4 of the famous Red Book there will be problems for health spending because of the massive cuts made in other areas of public services such as in adult social care.

I really hope that Miliband’s very effective demolition of the austerity programme of the coalition government means that he realises the growing opposition to the whole notion of austerity and punishing the poor as a way of paying for the sins of the banking community in 2008-9.

What we need in a Budget is surely an increase in the minimum wage and a massive investment in house building by councils and a guarantee of decent training apprenticeships and higher education places for all young people.

Meanwhile outside in the central lobby, striking firefighters from Essex mingled with college lecturers and adult education users terrified of job losses, cuts and closures. For a few fleeting moments the reality of modern Britain made its way into the heart of Parliament.