OBR lined up as the fall guy

In a typical deviation from matters IPTV (sorry Iolo) it looks like the "independent body" the Office of Budget   Responsibility set up by George Osborne is now being blamed by George Osborne for not getting its forecasts right which reminds me of the first law of forecasting - the only certainty is that forecasts will be wrong. These forecasting errors explain, apparently, why the UK economy is in the brown stuff.

A more likely explanation is that the "expansionary fiscal contractionism" at the heart of Osborne's policies (basically that during austerity the private sector gets excited and starts spending) is such schoolboy garbage that it is impossible to forecast around.

Perhaps if the Govt & Treasury could stop pleasuring itself by being "tough" on everybody confidence could return and maybe even some growth..........

Footnote: Peter, on this we're in accord. Take the son of a stockbroker who has never had a proper job in his life, and put him in charge of our national finances, and he'll make Gordon Brown look good... Ironically, they both share the PFI ideology which is the modern day Keynsianism, and that has really loaded us with off balance sheet debt beyond anything we can afford.

Oh, and they forgot to tax some of the UK's largest companies at all: Google, Amazon, Facebook... How laissez faire !  

But at least we don't have the horrible, extreme politics that now degrade the USA - let's deal with the obvious effects on our media in later posts -  IJ.