Resigning OBR chief Alan Budd describes “nightmare” Tory economic policies in archive video

Scrapbook’s exclusive last week exposed the Office for Budget Responsibility as a gimmicky re-branding of the Treasury office which produced economic forecasts for previous budgets. The subsequent resignation of Alan Budd has not only left George Osborne in the position of selecting the next leader of this, um, completely independent body but has set tongues wagging as to why its chief would reach for the emergency parachutes after just three months.

Perhaps the answer lies in a video posted today by the The Other TaxPayers’ Alliance.Taken from Adam Curtis’ 1992 documentary Pandora’s Box, Budd outlines his concerns that Thatcherite economic policies were designed to raise levels of unemployment deliberately:

The nightmare I sometimes have about this whole experience runs as follows. I was involved in making a number of proposals which were, partly at least, adopted by the government and put in play by the government. Now my worry is … that there may have been people making the actual policy decisions, or people behind them, or people behind them who never believed for a moment that this was the correct way to bring down inflation. They did, however, see that this would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment and raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes. So what was engineered there, in Marxist terms, was a crisis of capitalism which recreated a reserve army of labour and has allowed the capitalist to make high profits ever since. I’m not saying I believe those stories but when I worry about all this I worry whether that was really what was going on.

Were his experiences in a Conservative HMT giving Alan sleepless nights again?