Chancellors increasingly make policy not on economic grounds, but to satisfy the letter of their own self-imposed fiscal rules, writes Ayushma Maharjan

Today, Rachel Reeves will unveil her second Budget. Her fiscal rules commit her to reducing public debt and returning to surplus. Yet if history is any guide, these pledges will prove no more durable than those of her predecessors. Successive Chancellors have introduced their own fiscal rules, and successive Chancellors have watched them crumble under political pressure.

When Gordon Brown first introduced fiscal rules in the late 1990s, they were intended to end the “short-termism” of British economic management. Yet public debt has since surged from under 40 per cent of GDP to nearly 100 per cent. Of the 54 medium-term forecasts made between 1990 and 2019, none saw actual spending come in below projections. Successive governments have consistently spent more than they planned, and while every Chancellor since Brown has unveiled their own fiscal rules, few have endured once political realities set in.

So what keeps going wrong? A

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