Fiscal rules are made to be broken, or otherwise changed to accommodate the unwillingness of governments to meet them.
Yet here in the UK, we seem to have made a habit of constantly shifting the goalposts so as to allow for ever-greater quantities of government spending and borrowing.
Could Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, plausibly get away with amending them yet again little more than four months after the last change?
Since Gordon Brown first introduced his “golden rule” to govern the public finances back in 1997, Britain has changed the rules more often than any other comparable economy.
The new set of rules announced by Reeves in October was the 10th such iteration. Every time they are changed, they are made just that little bit looser.
Now it looks as though they will again have to be revisited – this time to absorb the higher defence spending military strategists and, increasingly, political leaders have come to regard as both necessary and inevitable.
How else is the Government to pay for the scale of military disbursement demanded by Donald Trump? And never mind Trump, how else is Britain going to fill the void left by America’s seeming determination to settle with Putin and throw Ukraine to the wolves?
It could of course tax more, or it could cut deep into other forms of spending, but this would risk sending the economy into a contractionary “doom loop” and therefore end up costing more than it raises.
Fiscal rules are made to be broken, or otherwise changed to accommodate the unwillingness of governments to meet them.
Yet here in the UK, we seem to have made a habit of constantly shifting the goalposts so as to allow for ever-greater quantities of government spending and borrowing.
Could Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, plausibly get away with amending them yet again little more than four months after the last change?
Since Gordon Brown first introduced his “golden rule” to govern the public finances back in 1997, Britain has changed the rules more often than any other comparable economy.
The new set of rules announced by Reeves in October was the 10th such iteration. Every time they are changed, they are made just that little bit looser.
Now it looks as though they will again have to be revisited – this time to absorb the higher defence spending military strategists and, increasingly, political leaders have come to regard as both necessary and inevitable.
How else is the Government to pay for the scale of military disbursement demanded by Donald Trump? And never mind Trump, how else is Britain going to fill the void left by America’s seeming determination to settle with Putin and throw Ukraine to the wolves?
It could of course tax more, or it could cut deep into other forms of spending, but this would risk sending the economy into a contractionary “doom loop” and therefore end up costing more than it raises.