There’s more detail about Osborne’s new Quango, the Office for Budget Regulation. As far as I can make out, it has five functions:-
1) Trashing Brown. The main point of a Never Again commission is to drive home an attack line: Brown Has Done A Very Bad Thing With All That Debt. It helps recast the narrative of the Labour years as one of profligacy, not prudence. Brown reinvented the history of the Major years, and constantly talks about them as being some kind of Long Black Wednesday. It’s important that Cameron starts to frame the economic debate in this way. In the 2005 election, they hardly spoke about the economy – as if cedeing that Brown had done a good job. Finally, the Tories have snapped out of it.
2) Pledge to voters. Like Osborne’s “triple lock on stability” and his “debt responsibility mechanism”, the OBR is complex-sounding and intended to indicate to the public that the Tories mean business.
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