Cabinet Ministers are clearly underemployed if they had nothing better to do today than to attend a meeting chaired by Keir Starmer. And as Rachel Reeves announces Professor Jonathan Haskel as her nominated candidate for Chairman of the Office for Budget Responsibility, what does the Chancellor of the Exchequer do at all, never mind for £72,454 over and above a parliamentary salary of £91,346?
Without a manifesto commitment, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown immediately surrendered democratic political control of monetary policy. The Liberal Democrats forced the creation of the OBR. The Conservatives created the short-lived Economic Advisory Council out of thin air, and 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.
People think Bank of England "independence" and the OBR are eternal.
ReplyDeleteThe first dates from the month of Love Shine a Light by Katrina and the Waves, and the second dates from the month of Good Times by Roll Deep. Hardly the ancient Constitution.
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