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.
In September 2022, the OBR’s standing within the U.K.’s economic policymaking process was significantly boosted. The new Prime Minister Liz Truss and her close ally, Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, released a ‘mini-budget’ that contained some £45 billion of tax cuts without commensurate reductions in public spending. They contended that such tax cuts were needed to supercharge economic growth. However, Opposition MPs and many economic and political commentators quailed at the effect they
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It is an interesting question , why economics is not a science.
Frederick Soddy, a Nobel Laureate chemist, pointed out that in science, wealth is positive and money is negative. Who knew ?
“If the Fiscal Responsibility Bill passes, all future governments will have to request that the OBR prepares an analysis of any proposed fiscal measure”
This isn’t true, any future government can, if it chooses, repeal the Bill. No government is bound by the decisions of a previous one.
Successive governments have abdicated responsibility to unelected, unaccountable bodies. This is shameful and a disgrace, elected politicians should be responsible not quangos.
Henry Ford – “you can have any colour car you want as long as its black.”
British Establishment – you can have any Government you want, as long as the policies don’t change.
At least you would have a car!
If there’s no possibility that policies can change, you wouldn’t be having a government, one that represented us.
“Stakeholder democracy is different in that it views the electorate as only one voice in the lawmaking and governing process – and not necessarily the most important.”
Actually I think this understates it. It views the electorate as fully irrelevant. Voters only get a legitimate say if they are directly affected by a measure as a” stakeholder”.
“Stakeholder democracy” is nothing less than the complete repudiation of democracy. We are seeing our ancient democratic system being literally dismantled.
It is dismantling the Crown in Parliament, so allowing Parliament to evade responsibility.
The Swamp is truly Septic !!
This stakeholder¹ democracy resembles Mussolini’s corporatist state a lot, ie, it looks very much like a fascist core concept.
¹ Can we have steakholder democracy instead? Sounds like more fun, especially if there’s also some pintholding.
I am in favour of a fiscal lock.
A fiscal lock that doesn’t allow a government to spend more than it collects or better still one that puts a hard limit, like maximum 10% income tax.
But this isn’t a fiscal lock. It’s a shift of power from parliament to bureaucrats.
A fiscal locks takes the power away from everyone.
How about abolition of all taxation except limited taxes on land value and consumer sales.
Such tax to cover essential working of government and defence, public services returned to the private sector, no welfare, and borrowing limit of 5% of GDP only in times of stress.
Oh. I’m up for all that. I was just trying to be “realistic” to illustrate my point. But, yes, that would be even better.
You could argue that a fiscal lock is undemocratic, but then you could argue that a limited democracy, where certain rights cannot be removed by simple majority, is better than what we have.
Can we have Budget Accountability instead.? That thing that if you don’t spend wisely, we have the means to fire you..?
Fire you and fine you, say, 50% of the cost to the public purse.
it would be simpler to go back to rotten boroughs and University MPs.
And back then MPs got no pay or expenses. Voluntary contributions from constituents defrayed some of their costs, and the size of contribution was linked to how well constituents thought their MP was serving their interests.
We should go back to that.
Aren’t they just establishing a costing oversight which will simply state that every Labour plan will bankrupt the nation? Net Zero is going to bankrupt every Western Nation that wants to die by just aiming for it.
Off-T
Paula Jardine at TCW with her thoughts on the next Scamdemic.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/big-pharma-is-the-lottery-winner-in-the-great-bird-flu-myth/
“So which strain of bird flu do you have on your bingo card for the pandemic flu mark 2 public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) this coming winter? The UK government has just signed a pandemic preparedness deal with CSL-Seqirus, the vaccine company now running the old Chiron factory in Speke, to supply 100 million doses of an unidentified flu vaccine in the event of a pandemic. But I can see another switcheroo coming. My money is on an outbreak of H9N7, the other influenza strain in Moderna’s new mRNA-1018 vaccine.”
‘The mRNA technology allows us to be much more agile in developing vaccines; we can start creating a mRNA vaccine within hours of sequencing a new viral strain with pandemic potential,’ said Dr Hensley. ‘During previous influenza pandemics, like the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, vaccines were difficult to manufacture and did not become available until after the initial pandemic waves subsided.’
Read: Nobody needs this shit and pandemic waves have so-far always subsided without it. But thanks to mRNA technology, we’ll be to market quickly enough in future to avoid this!
Deborah Birx is also again making noises about “avoiding the mistakes made with COVID”, start mass testing of healthy people now and stop requiring symptoms for diagnosis in favour of using PCR test results instead. Deborah Birx would seem to be one of the mistakes made with COVID. After all, she admitted to tricking the Trump administations into principally endless lockdowns by lying about her true intentions.
Government… Budget Responsibility. Side-splitting laughter is heard around the parish.
Central economic planning and control aka fiscal policies = root of Socialism and Fascism. In the former the State owns the means of production, in the latter the State directs the means of production giving the appearance of private ownership in a free economy.
The technocratic aspects plants it in the Fascist economic model.
The Industrial Revolution occurred because there were no fiscal policies, had there been we would all still be working on the land, as soon we shall be as Net Zero progresses.
(The primary means of production is the Human Being.)
Isn’t “stakeholder democracy” something of an oxymoron? Seems like code for “experts who know best will decide”.
Stakeholders, unlike share holders, have invested nothing so have nothing to lose when things go tits-up.
The idea is that stakeholders, unlike share holders, are the one’s who’ll be directly affected by decisions and that’s why they should all get together to make such decisions in a way that’s sensible for all of them (or the best possible compromise which can be achieved). Share holders have no direct reason to care for the outcome of any particular decision, just for the indirect effect of share price changes.