Amid the partisan clamour of the election campaign, Paul Johnson, the owlish director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and his team of young policy wonks have come to be seen as the ultimate arbiters of that endlessly repeated question, “Do the parties’ sums add up?”
Ever since it was founded in 1969, it has been part of the thinktank’s raison d’etre to raise the quality of national debate about tax and spending policy. Publicly funded, through the Economic and Social Research Council, its number-crunchers, many of whom join as young researchers straight from university, answer to no one.
They see the world from a particular standpoint, where clarity, consistency and economic logic trump political point-scoring and what politicians call the “retail offer” to the voter – hence their tone of weary despair when sifting through the parties’ plans.
Such genuine impartiality becomes a major asset during an election campaign, when every claim and counterclaim is scrutinised for ulterior motives.
Another reason the IFS’s voice is heard so clearly is that thinktanks, pressure groups, and even officials at the Treasury and the Bank of England, go into deep purdah during a formal campaign.
At budget time, while the IFS’s analysis is still the gold standard, journalists also have to digest a plethora of reports from other thinktanks, as well as the prognostications of the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, set up by George Osborne to audit the Treasury’s forecasts and run by Robert Chote, himself a former director of the IFS.
In March, Chote’s slogan that George Osborne was planning a “rollercoaster” profile of public spending over the next parliament captured public attention.
But with the election in full swing, most of those voices have fallen silent. Once the parties’ manifestos have been published, thinktanks have missed their moment to influence policymakers – until after a new government is formed, when lobbying will start up again in earnest. They are also constantly at risk of appearing to be cleaving too closely to one particular party, rather than rising above the fray.
Some insiders say the recent Lobbying Act, which constrains the actions of any organisation seeking to influence politicians – particularly during the runup to an election – has given thinktanks another reason to fall silent until 8 May, in order to avoid anything that could be deemed “campaigning”.
And the IFS’s alumni are planted throughout British public life – Newsnight presenter Evan Davis is a veteran; so is George Osborne’s right hand man Rupert Harrison and the Guardian’s own Tom Clark. All of them share a tendency to pepper their conversation with statistics, and a tone of mild exasperation at others’ failure to grasp the basics of economics.
