Budget 2015: Saint George wields a large stick with which to beat Labour

The Chancellor promised not to indulge in "gimmicks" and predictable pre-election "giveaways", but his hour-long speech included quite a few rabbits and plenty of hyperbole.

His school-boyish invocation of the Battle of Agincourt (the 600th anniversary of which falls later this year) almost invited commentators to plunder Shakespeare's dramatization of Henry V. In 1415, of course, England scored a victory over a superior French army or, as the Chancellor joked, defeated "an alliance between the champion of a united Europe and a renegade force of Scottish nationalists".

Now I'm no Agincourt expert, but a quick Google search doesn't reveal anything about a "renegade force of Scottish nationalists". Scots certainly fought alongside the French, but only several years after that decisive battle, including a crushing defeat of the English at the Battle of Bauge in 1421.

Dodgy history aside, it was a curious remark to make just months before a modern army of Scottish Nationalists looks likely to inflict damage upon the Labour Party and therefore (arguably) the Union that Mr Osborne claims to value. Indeed, his allusion to Agincourt then segued into the usual stuff about creating a "northern powerhouse" and "historic" city deals for conurbations across Scotland and England.

Somehow, the Chancellor resisted the opportunity to remind the SNP about its North Sea oil projections in the run up to referendum day. Indeed, as it emerged in the usual volley of tweets and analysis following the Budget statement, the Office of Budget Responsibility now predicts receipts of £700 million in 2015/16 and £600m in 2016/17. The independence White Paper forecast £6.8 billion and £7.9bn respectively.

Sure, predicting oil revenues is a mug's game, but no amount of spin could plug such a chasm. Instead, in announcing "bold and immediate action" for the North Sea oil industry, chiefly a "generous" tax allowance, government investment in new seismic surveys and a backdated cut in the supplementary charge from 30 to 20 per cent, Mr Osborne merely pointed out that an independent Scotland could "never have been able to afford" such a package. Proof, added the Chancellor, of the Union's strength; proof, he continued, "we are one United Kingdom".

Such rhetoric disguised the fact that the Chancellor had basically given the SNP everything they'd been demanding over the last few weeks, not that there was any smidgeon of thanks in the usual Scottish Government press release bemoaning how terrible everything was. SNP Treasury spokesman Stewart Hosie dismissed the Budget as failing "once again to address real needs of people of Scotland", which of course would have been the line no matter what Mr Osborne had announced.

Others highlighted what the Chancellor's (possibly final) Budget did not mention. Indeed, listening to it one could have been forgiven for believing austerity was somehow ancient history, so fleeting were any mentions of cuts. Some of the "good" news was only positive in a relative sense: the public spending squeeze would end a year early; debt and borrowing were falling, but both from eye-wateringly high levels.

As the First Minister frequently points out, Mr Osborne's aims on becoming Chancellor five years ago have failed even if judged on their own terms. And as the former Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling observed yesterday afternoon, when he set a target of halving the deficit in the course of the 2010-15 Parliament, the-then Shadow Chancellor attacked it as inadequate; now, in Mr Osborne's hands, it is hailed as a great achievement.

When it came to state spending as a share of GDP, the Chancellor also included a nugget for those, as he put it with a hint of contempt, "who are interested in the history of these things". Rather than gloomy talk of his budgeting taking the UK back to a ratio last experienced in 1938, Mr Osborne said a better comparison was the year 2000 when, of course, Labour was in government.

But then this Budget, as ever with Mr Osborne, resembled a large stick with which to beat the Labour party. The choice, as he put it, was between a recovering economy or a return to the "chaos" of the past. And, in other remarks aimed squarely at the Labour benches, the Chancellor pointed to declining inequality, lower child and pensioner poverty and a record number of apprenticeships and disadvantaged students attending university. A tuition fee cut, as proposed by Ed Miliband, would be neither "progressive nor fair".

Again, it was all relative, although usefully for the forthcoming election the headline figures were all good: high employment, fewer benefit claimants and growth forecast to hover around 2.4 per cent until 2019. The personal tax allowance was to carry on rising, while Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs) were to become more flexible and generous. Mr Osborne also pointed out that the proportion of income tax paid by the top one per cent was increasing, although he didn't dwell on the reasons why, one of which, of course, is that many members of that particular financial elite are earning more money than ever before.

As budgets go it was what could best be described as solid. Mr Osborne did not, like Henry V, "unloose" any Gordian knots of policy, but there was plenty of battlefield rhetoric. "From the depths," intoned the Chancellor, "Britain" was "returning", "on the rise" or "walking tall again". Actually, his repeated use of the epithet "Britain" felt curiously dated, while his peroration styling Britain as "the comeback country" might have been better delivered in a high-school play.

Nevertheless, given the pre-election context, the game was afoot. The Chancellor followed his spirit and, upon this charge, cried "God for England and Saint George!" at the Labour Party in particular and, of course, the voting public in general.