How the OBR became the Department for Austerity

Rachel Reeves mentioned the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) 19 times in her Spring Statement speech on Wednesday .

OBR 's devotion to OBR comes from something we might think of as BBC verify syndrome, writes Andrew Keen .

Keen: Government has begun justifying everything they do relative to its model which is wrong, and wrong to an extent.

The OBR has remained true to its stated purpose of testing the government’s fiscal plans.

But do we really think George Osborne wanted to give a group of economists independent power to scrutinise him? Does that sound like George Osborne to you? A cynical interpretation might be that David Cameron and Osborne co-opted other institutions to make it seem as if what they were doing was reasonable.