In one of the Labour Government’s first actions, it will bring before parliament a Bill to extend the powers of the Office of Budget Responsibility. This step is in keeping with the long-term, little discussed policy to shift Britain from a representative democracy to a stakeholder democracy. It will thus inevitably encourage fresh assessment of the real-life performance of economic ‘experts’. It also, however, raises many disturbing questions about the ability in practice of any future government to stray far from the currently accepted, mainstream economic orthodoxy.
The Office of Budget Responsibility was created in 2010 in the early days of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government. Tasked with providing independent analysis and forecasts of government fiscal policies, the OBR is analogous to the USA’s Congressional Budget Office and France’s Haut Conseil des Finances Publiques. Since its establishment, the OBR has come to be seen, at least by non-governmental MPs and political and economic commentators, as an authoritative source of policy scrutiny – a sort of expert reality check to balance government spin.
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