On the day the government released its famous Charter for Budget Responsibility in 2014, the Chancellor made a speech in New York. In it, he told the world that failing to ‘balance the books’ and reduce Britain’s debt would be a “dereliction of our duty to future generations”. This refrain has been a fixture of the Osbornomics vernacular since 2010, echoing through the coalition years and lodging itself in the mind of the voter, in that large cavity of the brain we use to store meaningless rhetoric.

If there remained any potency in the Conservative claim to be guardians of the future, it vanished last Thursday, as the government axed student maintenance grants by means of a low-key committee meeting. Originally announced in Osborne’s July budget, the decision brought an end to a policy which helped almost half a million of the UK’s poorest students pay for rent, bills, and other necessities. The juxtaposition between the cutting of what for many was a precious opportunity, made transparent the fact that the government could no longer present itself as the link to a prosperous future.

Critics of the government often underline their unflinching spite by damning the cuts as ideological, as if this alone is enough to condemn them. No doubt George Osborne is an ideologue. But he is also, like Maggie before him, a pragmatic and cunning politician. After all, this is the master of triangulation who, months after labelling the opposition fiscally incompetent, stole from them both the living wage and the tax on non-doms. However, the grants issue demonstrates more than garden variety political subterfuge. Indeed, in this case it is not just the public which Osborne is misdirecting, but the national economy. The cuts to grants are indicative of a trend which sheds light on a basic contradiction of the Osborne agenda between his ideological goals and the political goals required to achieve them. It is a contradiction which threatens to seriously imbalance the future of the UK’s economy and society.

Everybody knows the first side of this dialectic. As much as Cameron is the heir to Blair, Osborne is Thatcher’s scion. And like any good Economist reader, Osborne wants to shrink the state through privatisation of services. The other face of the coin is the political. Last Thursday's developments fall in line with a pattern of cuts to services and subsidies which primarily benefit the young. Comparatively, the Tories have been conspicuously conservative in taking their scissors to the elderly. The Prime Minister has consistently expressed his opposition to means testing for winter fuel payments, free bus passes, and free television licences as well as emphasising, or rather over-emphasising his government’s protection of pensions through the so-called triple-lock.

The political preference shown towards the elderly can also be seen in the way local cuts to services fall. In Cambridge we have recently seen the County Council fight to switch the lights off in the face of local, mainly student, opposition. These may not be direct government cuts, but they share the same internal logic. Whether in Westminster or Shire Hall, an administration bent on cutting costs and dependent on the votes of the old must necessarily bring the axe down doubly hard on the youth.

The effect of this unbalanced pattern of cuts is moulding a future which looks increasingly bleak for those actually in work and education. Rather than investing in the future, Osborne is condemning future generations to a life plagued by personal debt and poor services.

His reforms may be couched in the language of sustainability, but Osborne is ensuring that the next generation will be burdened with personal debt and anxiety. Our gerontocratic political system is creating perverse incentives for the government and certainly undermining the justification for its agenda. Osborne could be rejecting this temptation; he could be investing in education, in our country’s future. Instead, he is divesting from the future and cashing in on the political revenue of the OAPs.