Budget Responsibility?

Rupert Harrison was George Osborne's long-time Chief of Staff and then Evening Standard employee, and he was the Conservative candidate for the new seat of Bicester and Woodstock at last year's General Election, losing fairly narrowly to a Liberal Democrat.

Thinking himself among friends on Newsnight, Harrison airily explained that since Osborne's creation of the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Chancellor of the Exchequer's contribution to the Budget consisted purely of writing the speech and then reading it out. The OBR had finished the Budget itself on Friday. Much of the rest of the programme was taken up with a similarly urbane, after-the-Loyal-Toast discussion of how the OBR was always wrong about everything, but not so as to affect the lives of anyone who mattered.

The rest of us have not mattered in 28 years. Without a manifesto commitment, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown immediately surrendered democratic political control of monetary policy. The Lib Dems forced the creation of the OBR. The Conservatives created the short-lived Economic Advisory Council out of thin air, and Rachel Reeves reconstituted a Council of Economic Advisers with at least one of the same people on it. Yet on none of those occasions have the salaries of the First Lord of the Treasury, of all other Treasury Ministers, and of all senior Treasury civil servants been halved, as they should have been.

Nor will Wes Streeting's salary be halved as he farmed out much of the National Health Service to a revival of the disastrous Private Finance Initiative, which is the reason why the NHS always "has no money" and therefore "has to be cut", largely by flogging off bits of it to the same private companies, generous political donors that they are. The unifying thread is now the NHS Federated Data Platform, with training in it provided by Multiverse. Multiverse is Euan Blair, while the FDP is Palantir, which is the Israeli intelligence that is about to install Blair's old man as the Governor of Gaza even while the Tony Blair Institute was running the digital ID in Britain. All this, and no more trial by jury, nor any more automatic right of appeal. We are not crazy. You are.