The OBR Translator
Politics Notebook #28: A helpful guide to the Office for Budget Responsibility report.
The Office for Budget Responsibility speaks in Yes Ministerly understatement.
Instead of stating plainly that the UK economy is a raging bin fire, it says things like, ‘Current indicators point to suboptimal economic performance’ or ‘Ministers have unveiled highly ambitious plans for the government to remain solvent for the next 28 minutes’.
Sir Humphrey would be proud.
The latest ‘Fiscal risks and sustainability’ report is littered with such euphemisms. For the assistance of the casual reader and the non-economist, I have translated the key points below.
The OBR Translator
OBR: ‘The UK’s public finances have emerged from a series of major global economic shocks in a relatively vulnerable position.’
Translation: At this point, Britain would fail a credit check at Argos.
OBR: ‘Efforts to put the UK’s public finances on a more sustainable footing have met with only limited and temporary success in recent years.’
Translation: The Chancellor should start playing the EuroMillions.
OBR: ‘The result has been a substantial erosion of the UK’s capacity to respond to future shocks and growing pressures on the public finances.’
Translation: Bulk-buy cat food.
OBR: ‘There are signs that the scale of public borrowing in the UK and other large, advanced economies is putting global sovereign debt markets under pressure.’
Translation: We’re fucked in so many directions even Bonnie Blue would be impressed.
OBR: ‘The triple lock has cost around three times more than initial expectations.’
Translation: Put down the myWaitrose card, Marjorie, and step away from the P&O brochures.
OBR: ‘The structure of the pensions system and its likely development over time also give rise to a set of longer-term fiscal pressures and risks.’
Translation: Millennials should plan to retire no earlier than five years after their death.
OBR: ‘Unfunded pension liabilities represent the second-largest government liability.’
Translation: England will soon resemble Mad Max but at least civil servants will be able to retire to Villefranche-sur-Mer.
OBR: ‘The total fiscal cost of the net zero transition in our central scenario is an estimated £803 billion, or £30 billion a year on average.’
Translation: We don’t know if a country can set up an OnlyFans but we would advise ministers to look into it.
The OBR report ought to be a wake-up call to the economic cataclysm the UK is daily edging closer towards. It won’t be, because we’ve had wake-up calls before and every time we’ve hit the snooze button rather than face up to the harsh light of day.
Our troubles are structural and so structural reform is the only answer, but structural reform means pain, and a lot of it; it means people who’ve never had it so good having it less good; it means self-denial today in the hope of prosperity one day.
This would involve a complete reorientation of the central messages of British politics since the 1980s away from choice and entitlement to duty and sacrifice. There are precious few votes in this and many more in squeezing another five or ten years out of the status quo.
The Prime Minister’s analysis is known only to him but even if he shares this diagnosis, he could not bring himself to administer the physic. He is a man for whom political imagination is in limited supply and guts at critically understocked levels.
And even if he somehow developed a backbone, we have a parliament with an impractically low threshold for economic pain, a parliament that doesn’t respect the Prime Minister and will not follow him into battle against vested interests and their own soft-left, soft-headed pieties.
Saving Britain is not about any one reform — ditching the triple lock, scrapping the NHS, abandoning Net Zero — but about a total reimagination of the relationship between the citizen and the state.
Our expectations for public services and their delivery must align with our preferred levels of taxation and appetite for personal responsibility. The perception of the state as a system from which one maximises his individual gains, regardless of the cost to others, must be replaced by a sense of concerted endeavour with shared obligations in pursuit of common gains.
Until a prime minister is willing to tell us this, Britain’s decline economic and spiritual will continue apace.
My question is why are we aiding and abetting exorbitant numbers of illegal immigrants into hotels, providing food, medical and dental services to those who have not and do not intend paying into our benefit system. Only the tax payers suffer.
BRILLIANT EXPLAINER OF THE SERIOUS STATE WE ARE IN. ENGAGING YET HITTING THE REALITY CHECK BUTTON HARD