Post Truth Politics
From
Rich80105@3:770/3 to
All on Sunday, November 27, 2016 17:56:42
With "post truth"accurately describing the communcation strategy of
the New Zealand government as it becomes clear that the results of
their policies are increasingly untenable, perhaps we need an Öffice
of Budget Responsibility", to impartially assess the financial impact
of policies from all political parties, not just election policies. _______________________________
Brexiteers will trash anyone who gets in their way
Martin Kettle
The attack on the Office for Budget Responsibility reveals where power
now lies. Leavers are the masters, and will flex their muscles at will
Thursday 24 November 2016
The Office for Budget Responsibility shines like a good deed in a
naughty world. It was created as an independent statutory body in 2010
to promote more trustworthy government. It was an excellent idea, was
widely welcomed and has worked well. It has survived six and a half
years. Now, though, it has been kneecapped in a back alley by Brexit
provos and its brand has been trashed in the anti-European pressıs
embrace of post-truth politics.
It may survive the encounter. Let us hope that it does. But this
weekıs hit-and-run attack means the age of OBR innocence is over. Its
cautious forecasts about the impact of Brexit on the British economy
had barely been reported by Chancellor Philip Hammond on Wednesday
before Brexiteers decided the OBR had to be done over for displaying insufficient optimism in the cause.
³Ridiculous and wrong,² said one anonymous cabinet minister of the
OBRıs extremely sober estimate that Brexit may cost Britain £59bn over
the coming five years. ³Not worth the paper it is written on,² said
another, or possibly the same minister. ³Another gloom and doom
scenario² complained the former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith.
³Lunatic,² said Jacob Rees-Mogg.
The Daily Mail, which led the cheerleading when George Osborne set up
the OBR and abolished what he called Gordon Brownıs ³fictional²
forecasts, takes a diametrically opposite view now. This week the Mail
took the lead in working the OBR over. You couldnıt believe anything
coming from a body with such an appalling record as the OBR, run by
³its Europhile chairman Robert Chote², the Mail opined on Thursday.
But what is the crime for which the OBR stands accused? Simply that it
stated, on the basis of the facts at its disposal, that there are many uncertainties about the impact of Brexit on the economy. What rational
person could disagree with that? Yet the OBRıs list of basic
assumptions in its 260-page report on the economic and fiscal outlook
this week are not exactly controversial: the UK to leave the EU in
2019; slower import and export growth in the transitional period; a
tighter migration regime.
Itıs true, the OBR has been very circumspect in its forecast. It does
not, for example, predict any specifically Brexit-related job losses
in the period up to 2021. That will strike many as a heroically sunny assumption, fully worthy of a medal from Liam Fox. But it is a good
reminder that Chote and his colleagues have erred on the side of
caution in their latest forecasts. Their message is that many things
are possible, from a doubling of current growth rates to the
disappearance of growth altogether amid a fresh recession.
Looking at the way the OBR hedges every statement about Brexit in its
report, some may suspect Chote has been nobbled to say too little.
Certainly thatıs the impression one gets when reading that the OBR, in accordance with its legal obligation to make its forecasts on the
basis of current government policy, has been told as little as the
rest of us about the May governmentıs negotiating position on Brexit.
The real problem is that the forecast reflects the data: uncertainty
in, uncertainty out.
Itıs important to remember this is inherent in the task of
forecasting. No one can predict the future. That includes the OBR. As
the late Denis Healey, Labourıs chancellor in the 1970s, once put it:
³Like long-term weather forecasts, economic forecasts are better than
nothing, but their origin lies in extrapolation from a partially known
past through an unknown present to an unknowable future, according to
theories about the causal relationships between certain economic
variables which are hotly disputed by academic economists, and may in
fact change from country to country or from decade to decade.²
The most important words in what Healey wrote are ³better than
nothing². Forecasts are inherently uncertain. They often, even
routinely, prove to be wrong. But that does not make them useless or
dishonest. If history, as Coleridge said, is a lantern on the stern of
a ship ploughing forward across the sea through pitch darkness, the
forecast is like a nautical chart in that same nocturnal voyage. Itıs
a guide to action and options based on recent previous experience, not
a guarantee of a safe passage.
The problem to which the OBR was intended to be a solution was that
until 2010 the forecasts were so often tweaked and spun for political
reasons that they had lost all credibility. In the absence of an
independent fiscal authority to reckon with, the Treasury simply
redefined the problems that it was setting itself. Gordon Brown became notorious for this. Alistair Darling flirted with setting up an
independent forecaster in 2008 because the financial crisis was making
a nonsense of the governmentıs own forecasts.
When Osborne set up the OBR two years later, Darling backed him. His
then deputy, David Laws, wrote later that it was an uncontroversial
reform.
And so it was, six years ago. But it reckoned without the
transformation of Brexit. Brexit was a decision taken for powerful
emotional reasons. It was a revolt against what the Daily Mail now
relentlessly dubs the elite, by which it really means elected
politicians of every stripe, even though the Mail itself is infinitely
more powerful than most institutions, not just media institutions, in
this country. So the facts in the forecasts are no longer just the
facts, as they were before the referendum, but the eliteıs facts,
politiciansı facts, facts that should not be believed.
This is a deeply disturbing change, and this week has produced an
episode that is emblematic of it. The trashing of the OBRıs
credibility has happened now, rather than before, because Brexit has
empowered it. If the facts seem to be at odds with Brexit, as the very carefully and conditionally expressed facts in the OBR report are,
then in Brexiteer eyes the fault does not and could not possibly lie
with Brexit, which is by definition beyond challenge, but with the
facts and in particular with those who report or believe the facts.
The Brexiteers are doing this because they can. The only fact they
believe in is the result of the referendum. Nothing else matters to
them. And, for now, they command the arena in which every political
argument is conducted, even if they do not command the argument. The
attempt to humble the OBR is intended as a reminder to Hammond and
Theresa May that the Brexiteers are masters now, and will be so until
they are stopped.
İ Guardian 2016
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