Of all the public services, education is the one I’m most interested in. You get a more dynamic economy, you deal with most social problems, and it’s morally right.

Osborne frames education as the highest-leverage public service: it is simultaneously an economic policy (raising productivity and growth), a social policy (mitigating downstream problems such as unemployment, crime, and inequality), and an ethical commitment (a matter of fairness and human development). The quote reflects a technocratic, outcomes-oriented view of government spending—prioritizing interventions that generate broad spillover benefits—while also appealing to moral legitimacy. It implies that investment in schooling is not merely a sectoral preference but a foundational strategy for national prosperity and social cohesion, making education a unifying rationale across ideological divides.