There has been a big debate, including on these pages, about the government’s fiscal rules and the likelihood of them changing at the end of this month when the chancellor presents her first budget. There is nothing new, I should say, in fiscal rules, or the measures that are their basis, being changed. Fiscal rules have been amended or abandoned so often that you sometimes wonder whether they are an endangered species. More to the point, is there any point to rules which, rather than guiding tax and spending decisions through thick and thin, are blown away when economic trouble occurs? There is a debate about when fiscal rules were first adopted in the UK.
