Sir Alan Budd has quit the Office for Budget Responsibility and left George Osborne’s Treasury in a shambles.
First David Laws. Now Sir Alan. Watch out Danny Alexander —= it can’t be long.
But there will be a difference in each case. Laws want because he was unethical. Alexander will go because he’s clueless. Budd? He’s gone because, I suggest, he just couldn’t face the disaster he’s seeing unfolding before his eyes.
You only need an iota of economic understanding to realise what Osborne is doing ahs no economic justification at all, is pure, nasty social engineering and is intended to crush most in society for a generation to come.
Budd has an iota of economic understanding. And he’s gone.
Was he pushed? I can’t for one minute imagine it.
So he went — because he did not believe the unemployment figures? Because he believed Osborne is pursuing an agenda that makes no sense? Because he believes cuts won’t work? All three? I don’t know yet. But I suspect the last.
The shambles is developing faster than I ever expected.
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Sir Alan Budd was interviewed for an excellent documentary on monetarism by Adam Curtis in 1992.
He describes the concerns he had in advising the Tories during the ’80s on tackling inflation:
“there may have been people making the actual policy decisions . . . who never believed for a moment that this was the correct way to bring down inflation.
“They did, however, see that it 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 — if you like, that what was engineered there in Marxist terms was a crisis of capitalism which re-created a reserve army of labour and has allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since.
“Now again, I would not say I believe that story, but when I really worry about all this, I worry whether that indeed was really what was going on.”
More recently, he said the following when the clamour for cuts amongst elites was building earlier this year:
“If you go too quickly, then there is a risk that the recovery will be snuffed out and we will go back into a recession — I mean what the Americans say: “Remember 1937.”” (http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2010/07/class-war-budd-thatcher-cuts)
Why does an arsonist leave leave the fire he has started?
Alan Budd on the last disaster he had a hand in
For someone who has been in and around government for 40 odd years he remains wilfully , and unbelievably, naive.
As he is a board member of the spread betting firm IG, who accept gambles on political events, I wonder what the odds they offer on those 2 million private sector jobs turning up?
I seriously think he would serve the company better on the other side of the counter.
The bookies do love a mug with a system.
I may be wrong, but didn’t Alan Budd say when the OBR was first announced when the Tories were in opposition, that he would only do the job temporarily? Why he said that is another matter
@Ralph
The Pope and the Queen apart doesn’t everyone do their jobs temporarily?