Tag Archives: office for budget responsibility

George Osborne's recipe for "independent" public sector offices

2:29pm Mon October 25th
Share
10 comments

Are you implementing unpopular public sector reforms? Would you benefit from political cover from a supposedly “independent” body? Simply follow the following recipe from British Sous-Chef Chancellor George Osborne. You will need:

One septuagenarian economist or one disgruntled Blairite
A group of Treasury civil servants
One laser printer
Some Blu-Tac
A name for the new organisation (including the word “independent”)

To create the new body:

1: Use the laser printer to make an A4 sign
2: Stick it outside the room where the Treasury civil servants are already working. Make sure you obscure the old signage properly or people will cotton on!

And – hey presto! – you have your new office. Scrapbook readers have already seen the impressive results for the Office for Budget Responsibility. Set up by George Osborne to guarantee the “independence and integrity” of growth and borrowing figures, the OBR comprised the same Treasury economists that produced data slammed by Osborne:

Scrapbook can now reveal photos of a more recent creation, the Independent Public Service Pensions Commission led by former Labour cabinet minister John Hutton.  In keeping with the mood of austerity sweeping across Whitehall, the sign was produced in black and white rather than colour:

Naturally, press enquiries for this independent body should be directed to Malcolm Graves in the, erm, Treasury press office.

Share

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

12:44pm Wed July 7th
Share
7 comments

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?

Share

The "independent" Office for Budget Responsibility: the same economists in exactly the same room!

11:18am Fri July 2nd
Share
40 comments

George Osborne’s much-vaunted Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) was supposedly set up to guarantee the “independence and integrity” of growth and borrowing figures which, he claimed, had been subject to “fiddling” under Labour.

Revelations that the OBR is is staffed by exactly the same Treasury economists that produced data slammed by Osborne have only strengthened claims that the whole thing is a cheap gimmick. Others have poured scorn on the OBR’s independent credentials, contrasting its vague legal status with that of bodies such as the National Audit Office and Office of National Statistics, which are truly independent through their accountability to parliament rather than the executive.

With Whitehall whisperings that the OBR came under pressure to overstate the problems facing the economy, how is the coalition spinning the composition of this body? Its official website states that OBR chief Sir Alan Budd is:

“… supported by a small secretariat of economists and public finance experts redeployed from within HM Treasury”

Well it seems they didn’t feel the need to “redeploy” them very far! -

As these exclusive images show, the former section for Macroeconomic and Fiscal Policy (MFP) was magically transformed into the Office for Budget Responsibility by … sticking a piece of paper over the old sign!

So the new “independent” OBR is not only staffed by the same economists but is located in exactly the same room – all within Osborne’s department.

At least they can’t use A4 paper to conceal their cuts.

UPDATE: The excellent Other TaxPayers’ Alliance have just tweeted their proposed re-brand!

Share
  • GMB Remploy campaign

  • Follow us on Twitter