Alan Budd

Sir Alan Budd is an economist, and provost of Queen's College, Oxford.

In late November 2004, Sir Alan was appointed to head an inquiry into Nannygate, a scandal over allegations that Home Secretary David Blunkett fast-tracked a visa application to allow his lover's Filipina nanny to stay in Britain.

Biography
A BBC News profile of Sir Alan Budd gives the following biographical details :


 * Educated at Oundle public school.
 * Undergraduate degree at the London School of Economics.
 * PhD at Cambridge.
 * 1970-1974: senior economic advisor to the Treasury.
 * 1981-1991: professor of economics at the London Business School.
 * 1991-1997: chief economic adviser to the Treasury and head of the government economic service.
 * 1999 onwards: provost of Queen's College, Oxford.
 * June 2004: Appointed to the independent panel set up to advise Tessa Jowell on BBC charter renewal.

Alan Budd speaks frankly about unemployment as a tool for class warfare
According to the New Statesman magazine, in a 1990 interview Budd spoke with remarkable frankness about the true purpose of the monetarist policies he had helped to champion during his time at the Treasury in the 1970s, and which were implemented by the Thatcher government in the 1980s. The article says that Budd "had a recurrent 'nightmare' that many in the Thatcher government 'never believed for a moment that [monetarism] was the correct way to bring down inflation. They did however see that this would be a very good way to raise unemployment. And raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes.... What was engineered - in Marxist terms - was a crisis of capitalism which re-created the reserve army of labour, and has allowed the capitalist to make high profits ever since.'"

SourceWatch resources

 * David Blunkett
 * Nannygate (Britain 2004)