According to the Guardian:
The government's independent economic watchdog will tear up its previous forecasts for the UK's growth prospects as it gives its first official verdict on the outlook for post-Brexit Britain this week.
The Office for Budget Responsibility is expected to paint a gloomy picture of lower growth, higher inflation and a larger-than-expected deficit as the UK negotiates its way out of the EU.
Now the OBR has a well founded reputation for getting its forecasts wrong: they are always too optimistic. In this case that is no comfort: expect things to be worse than they say.
And what this shows is how resoundingly fickle people are. They bought the austerity narrative until they bought the EU / migration narrative. And then they voted to make themselves worse off.
All that can be concluded is that politics is no longer just about the economy. Or that people can be conned, and are.
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Alternatively, they’ve just been told to give Hammond cover for another bout of austerity.
Couldn’t agree more.
As Frank Zappa once said ‘Absurdity is the new reality’.
Time for the OBI to replace the OBR where the ‘I’ stands for Irresponsibility or maybe even Irrelevance..
I saw a cartoon the other day which had a caption:
“My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to stay sane” – that sums up my state of mind fairly well.
I currently subscribe to three papers, The Guardian, The Irish Times and the New York times. Things are ticking along OK in Ireland; sadly Brexit is a farce – slowly turning to tragedy. My major worry about the Trump administration is climate change.
I am reminded again of your post “clowns to the left of me jokers to the right” by the article from Professor John Abraham in the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/nov/17/trump-begins-filling-environmental-posts-with-clowns
which does nothing to allay my fears.
I have no idea what the Brexit team is up to. I may be coming around to the they that they know it will be an absolute disaster and somehow want to shift blame. The Trump victory has the EU rattled. The very survival of Liberal Democracy and the EU itself seems uncertain. Attitudes are hardening and the odds of a soft Brexit are lengthening. It will clearly be the dastardly EU’s fault when negotiation doesn’t go well
The Anna Soubry interview (Saturday Guardian) was interesting (full text https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/nov/18/anna-soubry-interview)
“How MPs in Westminster vote might turn out to be moot if Soubry is right about her next point. The government is appealing against the high court ruling, but at the supreme court hearing, the Scottish government will argue that the consent of Holyrood is also required to trigger article 50. Soubry thinks it has a strong case. “Yes. I’m reliably informed that the Scotland Act 2016 section 2 says that you cannot interfere with devolved Scottish matters, they must be determined by the Scottish parliament.”
If, as seems likely, Scotland were to block article 50, what would happen then? “Well, we’re in a terrible constitutional crisis. We are on the verge of a constitutional crisis the likes of which we have not seen.””
Is May secretly hoping the Supreme Court will come to this conclusion?
This is more a postscript
Support for the EU on the rise since Brexit vote … even in the UK
“But the Bertelsmann survey, completed in August against a backdrop of confusion about the British government’s Brexit strategy, showed that 56% of British citizens wanted to stay in the EU, compared with 49% when a similar survey was conducted in March.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/21/support-for-the-eu-on-the-rise-since-brexit-vote-even-in-the-uk?CMP=fb_gu
There was bound to be remorse
It would be useful if she did