Liz Truss is on manoeuvres. She is spending lots of time where she is most comfortable, inside Westminster’s thinktanks, preaching her version of free-market economics. There are rumours she might assemble a new thinktank of her own, or work with an existing one, to set up an alternative to the Office for Budget Responsibility’s growth forecasts.
The OBR was prevented from producing a forecast for the mini-Budget. Still, to Truss, it represents the naysayers, the UK’s economic ‘orthodoxy’ who tore apart her mini-Budget. An alternative forecast, she believes, could confront the gloomsters and doomsters and vindicate her belief that supply-side reforms – tax cuts, deregulation, privatisation – are needed to help economic growth. She wants to make the case for change.
Truss’s supporters are right to point out that since the OBR was founded by George Osborne in 2010, it has consistently underestimated the benefits of certain reforms, such as David Cameron’s changes to the labour market.
If every institution ends up acquiring some bias – as hard as it may try to stay neutral – then why not set up a rival forecaster and deliberately build in a bias for optimism? Let their predictions compete, and one will soon prove to be more reliable than the other.
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