Filling the job of the head of the so called independent Office for Budget Responsibility was always going to be a nightmare — because the incoming office holder had to buy Osborne’s argument that there was an inherited significant structural deficit in the UK’s funding, and not many actually do agree with that idea — at last as Osborne claims it.
But there cometh the man - Robert Chote, the head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies who was named today named by George Osborne as the new head of the Office for Budget Responsibility.
Oh well, it was predictable. I’ve always argued the IFS is strongly Tory inclined.
And how convenient for Stephanie Flanders at the BBC — formerly of the IFS — who can now apply for Chote’s job and really let her desire for unlimited cuts have full rip.
Happy days for right wing tax geeks, eh?
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Richard, from Stephanie Flanders reports I find it hard tell what her politics are.
Perhaps she really is the “right wing tax geek” you’ve labelled her.
However, I note from her biography that she was in the past a speech writer and advisor to that well known right winger …. Larry Summers. Summers was of course Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary and is now a leading economic advisor to Barack Obama.
People’s views can of course change, but it is to say the least an interesting background for a “right wing tax geek”.
@Tim Johnson
Good point on Stephanie Flanders but I’d classify Larry Summers as a “right-winger” for sure. He was one of the architects of the financial deregulation that gave us the economic crisis of 2008.
For sure he’s less far right than most of the current Republican “thinkers”, but that’s not that hard.