There seems to be some people who are mistakenly supportive of the Tory budget when it was actually yet another attack on working people and young people.

The Tories are simply stealing the term “living wage” and turning it into something they can use to pretend they are doing something positive.

The living wage needs to be calculated on the actual cost of living, not just plucked out of George Osborne’s head at random.

This “living wage” will also only apply to those over 25, when there are many people with families struggling under that age.

It won’t apply to people in the public sector – another attempt to attack the public services and drive a wedge between workers in the public and private sectors.

The worst part of this Conservative con is that while Osborne appears to give with one hand, he is snatching back even more by cutting tax credits, despite David Cameron promising, during the election campaign, that they would not be touched.

About 13 million of the least well off people, the vast majority of whom are hard working families, will be worse off as a result of this budget.

How many of them will benefit from inheriting a house worth nearly £1million?

Young people who were hoping to improve their chances in life by continuing their education are also worse off after this Budget.

Currently students from the least well off families benefitted from the small grant that went towards their rent while at university. It went some way to alleviate the fears of students from families who feared the massive debt getting a degree now entails.

Since the government hiked the tuition fees to £9,000 many students from working class backgrounds had decided not to go to university.

They were brought up not to get into debt because they lived on a tight budget, liked to live within their means and not borrow.

Debt is a very scary thing when you cannot be sure you will be able to pay it off. Now they have made that fear worse because the grant has now become another loan.

To top it all, the government is taking off the cap on fees so there will soon be an increase in those for some universities. Osborne clearly believes that university should be a place exclusively for the well off.

NE Cambs is an area which has higher levels of poverty than most of the country. According to a report last year by the Centre for Research in Social Policy, 24.01 per cent of children in our area are living in poverty.

Barnardo’s also recently warned about how many children in our area would be badly affected by cuts to tax credits. The government claim to have reduced child poverty but that is another Con trick – it has simply redefined poverty.

So was it a ‘good’ budget for the country? Not if you are young and not unless you’re already rich.

MARTIN FIELD

Via e-mail