Guido reported in July that the Office for Budget Responsibility hired Corbyn-praising high-tax professor Rita de la Feria to its advisory panel. The OBR has now officially announced its full panel. With taxpayer funded quangos like these, who needs leftist think tanks?

Despite the OBR boasting of a “wider range of experts”, none of its advisors are publicly pro-Brexit and those active on Twitter regularly stress their Remainer credentials. The quango, whose senior leadership is populated by Resolution Foundation veterans, can expect top-level analysis at its roundtables, such as former Treasury Director Anita Charlesworth saying that the “point about the Brexit dividend being a fiction can’t be stressed too much or too often.” Oxford’s Michael McMahon will presumably ask if we should “just accept Brexit despite lies that were the basis of many people’s vote?”

Their views on tax make glum reading. Arun Advani, Warwick University Professor, commissioner for the Wealth Tax Commission and the UK’s leading advocate of wealth taxes, spends his time proposing the debunked tax on Twitter and decrying the “neo-capitalist narrative” that tax cuts are good.

McKinsey’s Research and Economics director Tera Allas responded to the news that the marginal tax rate for a taxpaying graduate reached 50% with “As a Finn, my brain is going, ‘and… what’s the big deal?’ I recall marginal tax rates in the 60s and 70s from my youth.” Goldman Sachs’ Kevin Daly thinks we need a property tax. 

UCL’s Wendy Carlin writes papers proposing “a new paradigm, including diminished space for capitalism and greater equality not only of economic endowments but also of dignity and voice.” She also argues that Soviet planning was beneficial in some countries, which “benefited more […] from infrastructure and human capital than they suffered from weak market incentives”. When can we expect the OBR to come out in support of collectivisation?

It must be reassuring for the OBR to consult experts so sanguine in the face of the highest taxes since the Second World War. The millions of working Britons currently being crushed by tax and inflation might prefer if they suggested ways to remedy the situation.