The day the fiscal rules died

So today’s the day; the day Alistair Darling will confirm that Brown’s current fiscal rules are to be scrapped.  Now, the rules have always been more of a fiddle than a useful economic tool – to meet the “golden rule” that the budget remains balanced over the course of the economic cycle, Brown blithely changed his definition of the economic cycle; and his use of off-balance sheet trickery to meet the “sustainable investment rule” is well-documented.  But the worry is that if those fiscal rules failed to constrain Brown, what will he be able to achieve – what debt will he be able to accrue – under a more “flexible” framework?  One shudders to think.

This is now a battle of political narratives.  In the red corner, we have Brown at his cunning best – reducing the argument into “responsible borrowing vs. irresponsible spendthriftery”, just as he reduced the tax and spend argument into one of “investment vs.