The Tories don’t have many good policies for dealing with the recession and what few policies they have seem to vary from the reasonably sensible to the very stupid. Heading up the sensible camp are loan guarantees, entirely sensible although not particularly original (hence the government coming up with something similar). Far more fun is the stupid end of the scale my favourite being the creation of an Office for Budget Responsibility.
Such an office is designed with the intention of restricting government spending and making sure the government doesn’t get us into unnecessary debt. Essentially it's a more extensive and more strictly enforced version of Gord’s golden rules.
So What's so Bad About it?
Well, the good thing about it is that it fits perfectly with the whole "Gordon Brown's debt" line their spinning to the media. The bad thing is the fact that it forces the government to jump through more pointless bureaucratic hoops. To demonstrate why this is a bad thing, it’s worth casting your mind back to a few months ago when fallout from the credit crunch really started to bite. The banks were close to meltdown and the government had to act decisively. Consider the situation had an Office for Budget Responsibility been in place; rather than a decisive action, the government’s hands would have been tied the whole affair would have become a drawn out bureaucratic process; it could have been a disaster.
The whole policy rests on the idea that there is a “right” way to handle a government budget, and that’s simply not true. There are experts who can predict roughly what is going to happen and there are a few obviously bad ideas, but ultimately when it comes to decisions that hold peoples lives in the balance, moving them out of the hands of politicians is moving them one step further away from the people they represent.
About the author: Andreas is a Labour activist based in Norwich, he's organiser for his local ward of Town Close. He works as a software developer and being the mercenary soul that he is has found himself working in the insurance, financial services, electronics and marketing industries at various points in time. He blogs at CitizenAndreas. Read more from this author