elephants fight, mice get flattened

the concept of an accountability sink

This has been bothering me all week; public sector pay settlements in the UK.  Starting with a bit of background……

Once upon a time, it was decided that many public sector pay settlements would be decided by an independent pay review body.  This seemed reasonably sensible at the time; it de-politicised the question and allowed for the possibility of unpopular decisions being made without being subject to too much public pressure.

Once upon a time, it was decided that anti-inflation policy would be assigned wholly to the independent central bank.  This seemed reasonably sensible at the time; there was pretty good economic theory in support of the idea that we’d get better outcomes if things were handed over to a body that could commit to policy over extended periods and wasn’t subject to the electoral cycle.

Once upon a time, it was decided that the overall level of tax and spending should be subject to a fiscal rule.  This seemed sensible to a lot of people at the time. To be honest pissed me off mightily and I have been complaining about it ever since, but the idea was that nobody trusted politicians and it was better to tie their hands and maintain confidence of the markets so that they wouldn’t sneakily run up the national debt.

You can see that all of these things are, at some level or another, excuses.  In the forthcoming book I call them “accountability sinks” – they are ways to avoid the unpleasant aspects of having to make a decision, by creating a system to which undesirable public feedback can be directed and dissipated.

Anyway, currently we are in a situation where the independent bodies have made a decision, but it’s outside the envelope of the inflation target and would involve fiscal spending.  Sounds like a political debate …

Except that all the parties to the debate appear to be talking not in terms of what is the right thing to do, but in terms of whether the fiscal rule has to be paramount, the independent board has to be respected or both of them have to be subjected to the inflation target.  The overpowering sensation is that the accountability sinks are having a fight between themselves, with us lot only looking on as spectators. 

It's sort of an aristocracy of excuses.  You can sort of see how people get alienated from politics and inclined to vote for populists.  To be honest, a dictatorship by ChatGPT no longer seems like it would be so much worse.  The overpowering political theme of my adult life has been a retreat, on the part of those with power, from any idea of making a decision and living with it. 

(It could be objected, as Tony Yates noted when I started ranting about this on Twitter, that the whole problem could be solved and the three autonomous rules brought back into equilibrium, if someone just proposed to fund the public pay settlements by raising taxes.  Of course, the accountability sink that completely rules that one out is pretty much the House Targaryen of this system; a political and economic consensus that’s more powerful than any of its rivals and whose origin is lost in the mists of time).