It was US President Harry Truman who reportedly said that he was fed-up with economists who told him “one the one hand Mr President…”, followed by “but on the other hand….”. Truman said he wanted a one-armed economist.

One of the new Commandments is “Thou shalt not accumulate public debts that have to paid off by future generations”. To which I answer, why not? Like most such axioms, any serious analysis soon shows that the Commandment isn’t quite as absolute, or a useful guide to action, as it first appears.

So, now we know the ‘how’ if not yet the ‘what’ of the cuts in public spending. “The Spending Review Framework” (Cm 7872) published June 8th sets out how the radical new Spending Review will operate, and it’s rather similar to the old one introduced by Labour in 1998.

One of the interesting processes going on at the moment is the election of chairs of select committees in Parliament, and then the members of the committees themselves.

The current debates about so-called ‘free’ schools remind me of an incident more than a decade ago which was somewhat seared into my memory.

So – apparently I have been to Atlantis. And there was me thinking I was just going on a short holiday to somewhere warm, sunny and quiet….. Please indulge this post, which has little to do with Whitehall or even public management, but I just wanted to share.

The most obvious thing about today’s £6.2bn worth of cuts is the degree to which Whitehall departments have successfully ‘passed the parcel’ onto other parts of public services: local and devolved government, quangos, universities, private sector contractors and suppliers, and others will take the bulk of the pain.

The Guardian is running with the ‘Labour’s spending spree’ story for all its worth, but no-one seems to be asking some rather obvious questions. First, the story alleges that an unusually high number of  Whitehall ‘accounting officers’ (usually permanent secretaries) lodged formal objections to spending decisions in the last year of the Labour government. So […]

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) is being touted as a really big reform to how the government ‘does’ fiscal policy. Essentially, the claim is that fiscal forecasting will be outsourced to the OBR which will be independent and therefore free of political interference. How does this claim stack up?

A lot of media analysts and city commentators have been loosely talking about the forthcoming Budget ‘spelling out the cuts’ that were so obviously absent from the election campaign. It won’t. David Cameron has just confirmed in an interview on the Andrew Marr show that the Budget will only spell out the spending envelope for […]