[Policy State Conversation] The political economy of technocratic economic governance and the conduct of Britain’s Office for Budget Responsibility: politics, public policies, and the state

This paper focuses on the creation in 2010 and subsequent operation of the independent body created to oversee fiscal rectitude in Britain, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). It analyses the politics of economic management of the UK’s uncertain trajectory, and of British capitalism’s restructuring in the 2010s and 2020s in the face of the upheavals of the global financial crisis (GFC), Brexit and COVID. A focus on the intersection between expert economic opinion of the OBR as UK’s fiscal watchdog, and the political economy of British capitalism’s evolution through and after Brexit, animates a framework for analysing the politics of technocratic economic governance. The idea of taking the politics out of fiscal policy and bolstering financial market credibility by farming it out to ‘technocrats’ proved to be a chimera. The technocratic vision of independent fiscal councils falls short because it fails to grasp a core political economy insight: that economic knowledge and narratives are political and social constructs. Economic projections and forecasting always involves judgement, and in the background are assumptions about principles of political economy which have been debated for centuries. Economic concepts – used to gauge growth trajectories and frame and pilot economic policy – are always founded upon contestable normative assumptions. even when advanced by technocratic bodies like the OBR. 

Speaker 

Ben Clift, University of Warwick 

Chair 

Ulrike Lepont, Sciences Po, CNRS