Budget scrutiny
For a body that once fought a civil war, and beheaded a king, over the right to control taxation, the Commons has a very strange way of handling the Budget.
After weeks of purdah, in which the proposals for changes in taxation and spending, and all the forecasts and projections are held in strictest secrecy (and only revealed to a select handful of Sunday newspaper journalists) the whole package is unveiled with a great flourish, in a theatrical Commons extravaganza.
It is then ritually denounced by an Opposition leader who will have had minimal opportunity to think about its contents, and then everyone heads for the bars as the Lib Dem leader gets up to give his party's views.
A four day debate, during which the chamber is largely empty, then follows. Up on the committee corridor, the Treasury Select Committee holds hearings with the Chancellor, independent economists and tax experts, and Treasury officials, before rushing out a report. And later, a wholly separate Public Bill Committee will process the Finance Bill, which gives legal effect to the tax changes made in the Budget.
Once, every thousand years or so, this process results in some change to the Budget - although governments do bring in amendments of their own, where something needs tidying up, or where a particular aspect of the Budget proves more troublesome than expected.
The classic example is the fabled Rooker-Wise amendment in 1977, when, with a little help from Nigel Lawson, Labour MPs Jeff Rooker and Audrey Wise index-linked tax thresholds, against the wishes of the then-Chancellor Dennis Healey. But most of the time the Finance Bill Committee is little more than a ritual.
Spookily, other Parliaments actually allow their members to see and ponder draft versions of their national budget, or its equivalent. Some have independent auditors who validate (or otherwise) the official assumptions about things like future economic growth or tax receipts or whatever. (In Britain the National Audit Office - the official public spending watchdog - is allowed to audit some specific parts of the budget, but doesn't go through the whole thing.)
And I grant you, in some places the result of more parliamentary oversight is an orgy of pork barrel politics, with taxpayers' money squandered on sweeteners in the constituencies of powerful parliamentarians. But sometimes the result is a better budget and more focused spending priorities.
Just a thought.
I'm Mark D'Arcy and I'll be writing about what goes on in the chambers and committee rooms at Westminster.
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