"The Tories are being crushed by their blind faith in incompetent technocrats

The Budget is likely to see the party pay a high price for failing to topple failed bodies like the OBR"

Telegraph: 4th March 2024: Article by Sherelle Jacobs identifying Conservative Party mis-steps when it comes to dealing with incompetent unelected bodies 

"Wednesday was supposed to mark a turning point for Rishi Sunak. Instead it looks set to signal the end of the road...the Spring Budget was meant to be the breakthrough moment when Rishi Sunak finally revealed himself to be the tax-cutting populist who would salvage his party’s fortunes... Yet the Prime Minister’s tax-cutting red meat seems to have been reduced to gristle by the Office for Budget Responsibility grinder...

The same spurious OBR modelling that Sunak deployed as an authoritative weapon to bludgeon the “reckless” Reaganite plans of his one-time opponent, Liz Truss, looks set to crush his own tax-cutting hopes...

But this is a crisis for more than just the Government. On a democratic level, it is staggering that a technocratic body that has consistently produced flawed and inaccurate forecasts is being allowed to effectively decide the country’s future direction...

He could have sought to focus attention on the behaviour of the Bank of England; it has after all not only been criticised for keeping interest rates too high for too long to cover its blushes over its earlier failures, but also engaging in a reckless quantitative tightening programme that has escaped any real democratic oversight. By aggressively dumping government bonds...the Bank may end up lumping taxpayers with losses of over £100 billion...

They [Conservative Party] must start articulating the perils of a bizarre faith in the predictive powers of modelling, even when it is regularly proved to be wrong. And they must call out the unelected “disaster” bureaucrats in Threadneedle Street and the Treasury, who feed on the chaos that they create... 

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