We Warned Reeves She Was Misrepresenting the Finances, OBR Tells MPs
The Office for Budget Responsibility has told MPs that it warned Rachel Reeves she was misrepresenting the finances ahead the Budget and was unhappy about how its forecasts were being spun in media briefings. The Telegraph has more.
Professor David Miles, a member of the OBR’s Budget Responsibility Committee, told MPs that leaks to the press from within the Treasury wrongly suggested that the watchdog’s forecasts were fluctuating wildly as Rachel Reeves laid the groundwork for tax rises.
Giving evidence before the Treasury Select Committee, Prof Miles said: “I think that it was clear that there was lots of information appearing in the press which perhaps wouldn’t normally be out there. And this wasn’t from our point of view particularly helpful.”
Asked if this was raised with the Treasury, he responded: “I think it was clear that we didn’t find it helpful.”
Pressed on who it was raised with, Prof Miles said: “With Treasury officials… I think certainly during the lead-up to the pre-measures forecast when there was speculation.
“Some of these misconceptions as I’ve described them were appearing in the press and we made it clear that they were not helpful and we weren’t in a position of course to put them right.”
Prof Miles added that Budget leaks from the Treasury “exacerbated” uncertainty in the markets and may even have damaged growth – one of Ms Reeves’s top priorities.
He is answering questions after the leak of Budget information before the Chancellor stood up in the Commons. Ms Reeves is battling to save her political career after it emerged she was told by the OBR she had a surplus of £4.2 billion, but still went on to suggest she would have to raise taxes because of a black hole in Britain’s finances.
Follow live coverage of the Treasury Select Committee here.
Stop Press: Reeves is less trusted on the economy than the Conservatives were under Liz Truss, a new poll has shown. According to the Telegraph: “A YouGov poll has shown that 10% of voters think Labour would be the best political party to handle the economy. This is lower than the party’s nadir under Jeremy Corbyn of 12% in September 2019. It is also below the Tories’ nadir of 15% in October 2022. That came in the wake of Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget which triggered a crisis in the bond markets, a sharp rise in government borrowing costs and contributed to the downfall of the Truss administration.”
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Just go. And take the rest with you.
“Lying, cheating, hurting, that’s all you seem to do
Messing around with every guy in town
Putting me down for thinking of someone new
Always the same, playing your game
Drive me insane, trouble is gonna come to you
One of these days and it won’t be long
You’ll look for me but, baby, I’ll be gone
This is all I gotta say to you, woman
Your time is gonna come
Your time is gonna come
Your time is gonna come
Your time is gonna come..”
(1969 Led Zepellin 1)
Government by a kakistocracy, what else could we expect?
We know it was not the Truss budget which caused market instability, which never came into effect, but Bank of England mismanagement. The only thing we do not know for sure is whether the BoE acted from incompetence or wilfully to damage a government with policies they did not like.
Truss was ousted because she wasn’t singing from the correct hymn sheet.
In other words, malice.
sorry hux, you said the same thing as I, rather more concisely
The BoE neglected to mention something quite important in that it was selling bonds to reduce the QE from both 2008 and Covid. And if it knew about pension funds gambling with LDIs then why was this not raised with Truss and Kwarteng? Of course with our public institutions you can never rule out ignorance and incompetence but this Truss affair looks more like a globalist stitch up. If only Truss could have reigned in her enthusiasm to get on with the job and funded growth through reduced spending.
My view is that Truss went because those who control governments realised she was not on side with the program. Bailey was simply instructed to discredit Truss to ensure Sunak who was the preferred placeman was installed
Agreed.
Mismanagement? Or deliberate action? I know where my money would be placed.
What Jim said; ”Something shifted today. The Budget row stopped being a story about dishonesty and became something darker: a government moving to remove the one man who could expose it. Rachel Reeves hasn’t simply misrepresented the public finances. She hasn’t simply engineered a false fiscal crisis. She is now clinging to office because the one man who could contradict her – the chairman of the OBR – has been shoved aside hours before he was due to give evidence. That is not politics. That is the state reaching for the dimmer switch to keep the truth out of sight. Richard Hughes’s resignation was dressed up as noble self-sacrifice, but the timing gives the game away. He falls on the morning Reeves faces her fiercest scrutiny. He disappears from the witness table where he was meant to confirm, under oath and in public, that the Chancellor had the upgraded forecasts before she warned the country of a black hole that did not exist. And he falls after days of pressure from ministers who suddenly lost their patience with the one body they had spent months claiming proved their credibility. A watchdog that tells the truth is useful to them. A… Read more »
I do not think it will save Rache the Incompetent Liar from the chop. It is extraordinary these days for somebody to do the decent thing and resign although to be fair I do not think he was directly responsible for the webteam preloading the documents to the site. That there had been attempts to access the documents from 5am should have alerted the webteam and I doubt Hughes fully understands what happened.
Rache has lied to Parliament which is a sacking offence and should see her removed not just as Chancellor but as an MP. She has also mislead the markets which should see an FCA investigation leading to prosecution and gaol. One could suggest Two Tier faces the same since he has also lied to Parliament and possibly also mislead the markets. If these two lowlifes do escape I think they will be done for in May.
Who really cares about Rachel, Starmer is manipulating all of this and is being manipulated himself by Bliar. Obama/Biden was the same. Starmer must fall because of this.
Yes if there’s any justice in the world the pair of them will be gone sooner rather than later. The UK government is a laughing stock around the world. A circus, where the front-benchers are the clowns and Starmer the malevolent ringmaster. Clown Lammy has just admitted to more prisoners being released ‘by accident’, but given the amount of criminals being allowed into the country from France ( and allowed to rub shoulders with the unsuspecting public ) these numbers probably pale into insignificance. I’m not even sure how it’s possible to keep releasing prisoners in error. How does that work, exactly? ”PUBLIC SAFETY UNDER THESE LABOUR CLOWNS IS NON-EXISTENT. Justice Secretary David Lammy has said 12 prisoners have been accidentally released in the past three weeks, two of whom are still at large. It comes on top of the 91 prisoners who were freed by mistake between April and October in England and Wales. Speaking to the BBC, Lammy said there would always be a “human error” while prisons were using a paper-based system and that the situation would improve once a “completely digital system” was adopted. He said there had been “a spike” in accidental releases but added… Read more »
There is no justice in this life, there seems to be plenty of evidence for that.
They’ll get theirs in the end though.
This so-called government has been acting illegally since it took office. Kneel is running out of lies. For once I do not believe this is a manufactured crisis it is a genuine F. Up which hi-lights the genuine arrogance, incompetence and malice in the way this criminal gang operates. This has to be called out continually until Kneel resigns but what comes afterwards will be another disaster of a coalition full of idiots.
We’re used to people like Putin silencing his opponents in various underhand ways. It’s depressing to see a UK government acting similarly.
I actually don’t understand what all the fuss is about. Misleading info, leaked budget, who gives a shit?
The bigger picture is that the country\s finances are a disaster. This government like all governments are tinkering around the edges to try to look as if they’re doing something while not fixing the fundamental problem.
And what, we’re all upset because the dog turd they’re forcing on us was slightly oversold, or undersold, or sold too soon? Would any of this small details have changed the fact that it’s a dog turd?
We deserve all the misery we get.
There is far more going on here Stewart than Thieves and Kneel deliberately lying to Parliament and the country.
Ignore the lies as mere fluff if you wish. But Rachel from Accounts and Keir Stumbler are Fabians dedicated to bring in Socialism by peaceful means. Perhaps by any peaceful means necessary. Maybe raising taxes to fund greater welfare payments is what they do?
That’s my point. It is what pretty much every governemnt has done for the last 100 years. And that is the problem, not the minutiae of what was said just before or after or whether the budget was leaked or not.
Actually the problem is that in a population full of net recipients of state handouts and services nobody wants to get less (although won’t admit it and instead will insist that reductions be done “fairly”, which basically means start elsewhere, not with me)
As usual I generally agree.
In the short term if this further discredits Labour and increases the chances of a Reform government then it gets my vote.
In the longer term maybe it will wake a few more people up to the fundamental changes I believe we need in our relationship with the state, though I am less hopeful about that. If it happens it will be because of a major collapse and I think we are a long way from that because there is still a lot
of hard work and competence enabling our lives of peace and comfort.