'The policy is not just a populist measure, designed to reassure the Daily Mail-reading classes'. Where do you get this bullocks from. It's not just the Daily Mail readers, it's the Daily Mirror readers also.

This is Osborne's version of Robert Mugabe's Operation Murambatsvina - "Clean Out the Filth".

Robert Hanes: You are wrong on this one.

From 2013, household benefit payments will be capped on the basis of median earnings after tax for working households, which we estimate to be around £500 per week by 2013. All Disability Living Allowance claimants, War Widows, and working families claiming the working tax credit will be exempt from the cap. The cap will apply to the combined income from:

The main income replacement benefits (Jobseeker’s Allowance, Income Support, Employment Support Allowance); Other means-tested benefits (including Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit);
Child Benefit and Child Tax Credit;
Other benefits (including Carer’s Allowance and Industrial Injuries Disablement Benefit.

The cap is not just applied to Housing Benefit at all.

Did anyone see QT last night? It was laughable how Hammond refused to be drawn on his own tax avoidance. You are right Luddite, it would be good to see people like Hammond excluded from representation. He clearly is not a man who should be advocating how people have to budget and pay 'their' way, whilst he himself uses all the usual dodges to evade paying his own dues.

Fatuous bull. Meanmindedness in every act. They don't care for the poor, unlike us. Only for themselves. Blah blah blah. And who created the mess?

The banks created the mess. Labour rescued the economy and we now have to start repaying the cost of that bailout. Before that the economy was sound. Obv.

Jane is quite right. What is more, I seem to recall that right until the eve of the banking crisis the Tories largely supported Labour's spending plans and the structural defecit was manageable. Post sub-prime crash, if the banks hadn't been bailed out we wouldn't have the defecit we've got now, but we would have a full scale depression.

With hindsight, the deregulation of the finance sector went too far and contributed to the depth of the doo doo the bankers created for themselves, but by 2008 the government weren't left with too many alternatives.

Luddite, You can only vote in General Elections id you are British or Irish. "Third world immigrants" don't have a vote.

I'm with you Francis, I see this nothing more than vandalism of society for the sake of some politcal ideology.

Brace yourself for the economic car crash.

Nick at 08.51
What Hammond said on QT last night was that he transferred shares that he owned in a private company into his Wifes ownership in anticipation of the election result as ministers are not allowed to own shares in a private company. He also confirmed that this would not avoid tax but would transfer any liability to his wife.
How exactly does a share disposal transaction that Hammond had to complete to serve in Government make him unsuited to represent the people who elected him?
What is laughable about him complying with the law?

Oh dear Robert Hanes, you are dreadfully thick. The benefit cap is for everything: food, housing, clothing, furnishings, bills, travel, whatever meagre recreation with the small change left over, for families of whatever size.

This is a perceptive article. The chancellor is seeking a version of economic "success" on his own terms, namely, a balanced budget.

If he achieves that, we will see the tories run in 2015 on a platform of a 2m inheritance tax threshold for married couples, capital gains tax rate falls, greater corporation tax allowances, a giveaway/sale of UKFI bank shares BT-style, and the restoration of welfare for the better off.

And they'll win, because they have economically gerrymandered the metropolitan centres (not just London, George!) of the UK and passed a shamefully politicised electoral reform bill to boot.

If anyone would have said in october 2008 that, two years after the wholesale failure of the global banking system whose activity brought the west within financial armagedden, we would see 7 percent year on year cuts to state services and a 0.02% - rising to 0.07% - tax on non-capital bank assets, with even the sniff of proposed regulation of the madcap banking sector kicked another year down the road, I would think there must be some sort of coup d'etat.