What was good about George Osborne's budget

The first unfettered Conservative budget for 18 years contained all the meanness towards the young, poor and disabled that you would expect.

But there was one initiative that I welcomed.

The move to cut public spending on tax credits while obliging employers to pay higher wages is surely right.

Tax credits are a way of subsiding bad employers from the public purse and are a move towards the intermeshing of the power of the state and the power of capital that Belloc warned about in The Servile State.

It may well be that some poor people will be worse off as a result of these changes - it is a Tory budget, after all - but the direction in which it is taking public policy is the right one.