JEREMY HUNT’S first Budget was a continuation of the stream of austerity policies that has been almost uninterrupted since 2010. They represent yet another attack on ordinary people struggling to get by. At the same time, the commitments to growth are meaningless without any effective policies to deliver them.

Perhaps worst of all, rather than attempting to tame inflation, the government has used it to impose accelerated real-terms cuts in public spending including public-sector pay. They also plan more of the same.

The verdict from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) was damning. They described the outcome as Britain facing “its biggest fall in spending power for 70 years as the surging cost of living eats into wages.”

Of course, Hunt did not mention this and instead attempted to distract from it; he tried to make the focus increased spending on childcare.

Universal free childcare is expensive and requires big spending. We previously had a highly efficient system for delivering called SureStart — but the Tories abolished it.

Now, seeing how far they are behind among women in the opinion polls, they are attempting to address the reputational and political damage without tackling the issue or properly funding it.

Any improvement in childcare availability will take years to come through. The government’s reliance on private childminders is another case of ideology getting in the way of effective policy. Individual, private childcare is much more expensive and unreliable than state provision.

The Early Years Alliance says the policy will drive up demand for childcare while failing to increase supply (which would require state-backed provision). It is a Poundland version of SureStart designed to get the Tories through the election with a promise of “jam tomorrow.”

The Labour front bench criticism has focused on the pension pot giveaway to high earners. This has a political impact. Despite what Hunt says, this is not about hospital consultants being lured back out of early retirement (where a special case could be made). It is instead a general benefit to all very high earners, a costly giveaway to those who already have very comfortable retirements.

It is a blatant example of the entire austerity policy: in a stagnating economy, we have both rising poverty and growing numbers of billionaires. This is because austerity does not simply cut — it is the transfer of incomes and wealth from workers to businesses, from the poor to the rich.

This needs to be said, to show how the entire policy is working as a whole. It is only then that the campaign to convince the public “there is no money left” can be shown to be the big lie that it is. Nailing this lie is also necessary to allow Labour to develop its alternative.

This lie is highlighted by the fact that the Chancellor had any money to give away at all in the Budget. He gave away almost £89 billion over the next five years, around three-quarters of a percentage point of GDP each year.

That money came from ordinary people, primarily the squeeze on public-sector spending, which is also projected to decline as a proportion of GDP in each of the next five years. In effect, the government has used inflation to cut public spending in real terms. This is increasingly understood concerning public-sector pay. But it also applies to public spending as a whole, so ordinary people are suffering to fund Hunt’s giveaways.

At the same time, inflation has boosted government tax receipts from sources such as income tax, self-assessment and VAT. The government could have redistributed this windfall to boost public spending including pay.

Instead, there was a string of handouts. These were much larger than the £4.4bn benefit to very high earners’ pension pots. Companies got £28bn in tax incentives to increase the chronically low level of investment in the economy. Pegging the fuel duty levy, which can only incentivise car use despite supposed commitments to Net Zero emissions, received £15bn. And the Ministry of Defence got an extra £11bn.

All of these handouts need calling out as they are much more costly than the pensions gift to high earners.

There is no serious evidence that cutting taxes on profits will boost investment, the supposed aim of the policy. When David Cameron and George Osborne tried similar measures, investment did not rise.

Instead, what tends to happen is that firms claim back taxes on investments they were going to make in any event, and had made in previous years. The only winners are shareholder dividends and executive bonuses.

The obvious alternative is that the government could have used the money for public-sector investment, thereby ensuring that the entire sum would be directed towards productive investment. But the policy is yet another example of free-market ideology standing in the way of logical policy.

It is nothing more than yet another handout to business or the rich — the flipside of cuts to public services, pay and welfare benefits that is the hallmark of austerity. It is certainly not a growth strategy.

The subsidy to polluters in the form of the fuel duty levy is completely unjustifiable. At £15bn over five years, it could have been used to retrofit more than 350,000 homes, cutting energy consumption, creating good jobs and reducing household energy bills over the long run.

The increase in military spending is based on a false claim. It is not part of any strategy which makes us safer. How could it be, when it will go towards funding for British nuclear submarines being sent to the South China Sea? Claims that we are under military threat from China would be justified if they were sending nuclear subs to the Channel — but the opposite is true.

The spending, which amounts to military posturing to please the US, is all the more reprehensible at a time when the numbers needing foodbanks, people dying in ambulances and households struggling to heat or eat are all rising.

It is important to remember that all of this was only possible because of the real cuts to public spending that the government has imposed. Ordinary people are paying for these policies, and not simply in terms of hardship.

The government’s intransigence on the pay disputes has now been broken. It appears now in some sectors that much higher settlements than were initially offered are both affordable and not inflationary, as had been claimed.

But it is important too to remember the OBR’s damning verdict on living standards, which will not be rising. Big fights against the effects of austerity still lie ahead of us.

Diane Abbott is MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington. Follow her on Twitter @HackneyAbbott.