With the global financial system in meltdown, George Osborne faced two big problems in his speech today. The first was to be heard at all on a day when the Bradford & Bingley was nationalised, shares were plunging and the markets were fretting about which would be the next domino to fall.

The second was to finger Gordon Brown as the man responsible for Britain's economic woes, a more difficult task than it was a couple of weeks ago.

Conservative strategists are aware of the public antagonism towards the City, and are keen to counter the idea that Labour will be more comfortable re-regulating the banks than the party traditionally associated with making life easier for big finance.

Osborne's answer to the first problem was to come up with an eye-catching proposal to cut council tax by taking the axe to central government's burgeoning budget for consultancy and advertising. Any council that keeps its council tax increases to 2.5% of less will receive extra money from Whitehall to reduce bills by a further 2.5%.

This, no question, is the sort of thing that goes down well in Middle England (the deal does not apply to the devolved administrations in the rest of the UK).

It is hard for ministers to justify the colossal sums spent on management consultancy; the government spends five times as much per employee than the private sector.

Moreover, voters hate paying council tax, which they assume is being blown by town hall pen-pushers rather than being spent on frontline services. The move towards fortnightly refuse collection has merely served to heighten this suspicion.

Osborne assumes that councils will be able to keep their council tax increases to 2.5% through greater efficiency. This, though, may be more difficult than he thinks. The bulk of council spending goes on wages and salaries, and across the economy as a whole they are rising by around 4%.

Add on the costs of public sector pensions and the need to provide care for an ageing population and it's not hard to see why there is upward pressure on council tax bills.

Osborne's answer to the second problem was to treat 1997 as year zero, ignoring anything that happened in the preceding 18 years of Conservative rule.

So, no mention of financial deregulation, no mention of Big Bang, no mention of the massive boom-bust in the housing market of the late 1980s and 1990s.

Despite that, his attack on Labour's handling of the economy was effective. The shadow chancellor pointed out – correctly – that for the past decade or more growth has depended the three engines of finance, housing and government spending, and scant attention was paid to what would happen if those engines stalled.

"Now the credit has dried up. The engines of the economy have stalled. The party is over."

If Labour's recovery in the opinion polls proves short-lived, it will be because the public has reached the same conclusion, and Osborne was particularly scathing about the prime minister's boast that Labour had abolished boom and bust.

The opposition's fear, nonetheless, is that the government will benefit from the financial crisis, both because of the effective action taken to rescue banks in trouble over the past fortnight, and from an unspoken sense that the Conservatives remain the party of the hedge fund dealer and the short-seller.

As a result, Osborne deployed some of his toughest language when he said he would not "increase taxes on the family earning £20,000 to carry on paying the bonuses of the banker earning £2m pounds."

It was, in truth, far more robust than Brown, Alistair Darling or any other member of the cabinet managed in Manchester last week.