Emergency Budget and Neutral Economics

Early days yet to add anything to the emerging comments on the budget, but one facet of the situation has struck me forceably. The budget is politically shaped and motivated - but could it ever be otherwise? Lib Dem influence has apparently determined some of the policies - so there is an obvious example. If they had not been in on the act and had the Tories instead got a clear majority, what would we now be facing? Then the coalition has set its face to keep a number of external parties "happy" - the City; the markets; credit ratings; its own supporters etc. There may be an economic aspect to some of this, but also strongly political reasons for pleasing these particular groups. So can one ever take the politics out of economics when it comes to government policies? Surely not! And yet the new administration claims to be doing just that by having set up the Office for Budget Responsibility, supposedly an independent and neutral interpreter of the national economy. Does it actually believe this claim, or is it simply an exercise in cynical manipulation? There is no such thing as neutral economics, but different schools within economics itself, often differing on political as well as pure economic grounds - e.g. Marxist, neo-liberal monetarist, New Keynsian etc. So which economists does one choose as one's tame experts and on what grounds? Perhaps the coalition really does believe in the neutrality of "experts", but then it is innocent in the extreme and I would suggest that Messrs Cameron and Osborne go back to Oxford for a while to read some basic philosophy or sociology! If they believe this still, then I suspect that many ordinary folks who are going to be in the firing line of the budget and spending review later this year, will be far from convinced that there is anything neutral about the policies or the experts wheeled out to support them. This is going to be seen as a renewed version of class conflict, with those who have protecting their position at the expense of those who have not, or those who won't have for very much longer. This may not be the intention, but it will be the effect. Good news for Marxists then? Maybe - but a call surely for more intellectual rigour in the way that current debates are being presented certainly.