Professor Ben Clift has been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for a project entitled ‘The OBR and the Politics of UK Growth amidst Brexit, Uncertainty and Austerity’. This will run from October 1st 2018 to September 30th 2021. The trust noted that ‘The competition for these Fellowships has been particularly keen. The Trust received 186 applications and awarded 33 Fellowships. More importantly, the quality of the applications was extremely high and the Trust Board has been gratified both by the outcome and by the distinction of the successful scholars.’

Ben’s Major Research Fellowship will draw back the veil on how UK growth assessments are constructed amidst pervasive uncertainty to explore the implications of Brexit and the British model of capitalism. The project penetrates the world of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in path-breaking fashion to reveal an under-appreciated politics of economic forecasting, and to analyse the political economy of Brexit. The analysis will explore how economic concepts used to frame and pilot economic policy, even when advanced by technocratic bodies like the OBR, are political constructions, always founded upon contestable and contested normative assumptions. Growth forecasts crucially mediate the politics of austerity through their implications for the tax take, and in assumptions they make about effects of government policy (and shocks like the GFC or Brexit) on actual and potential growth. Government policy options are opened up or closed off by particular renderings of Britain’s growth trajectory and their assumptive foundations (notably about Brexit effects).

This hugely impressive achievement means that the Department of Politics and International Studies now holds a record four Leverhulme Major Research Fellowships — the others being held by Professors Richard Aldrich, Shaun Breslin, and Mike Saward.