The dictionary defines a rule as a prescribed guide for conduct or action - something that tells you how you should or must behave.
Example: “The school has strict rules about attendance.”
Or an authoritative regulation - a principle, law or directive set by an authority.
Example: “The tax rules are changing next year.”
Now, guess how many times the UK Government’s fiscal rules have changed in the last 18 years.
Three times? Five? Maybe eight?
Nope. Eleven.
Thank God this latest set is “iron-clad”.
Or will that prove not to be the case?
My children change their breakfast cereal less often than the UK Government changes its fiscal rules.
So let’s stop calling them rules. They’re more like New Year’s resolutions: full of conviction on day one, quietly ignored by week two.
And this is a problem, because:
1. It Erodes Credibility
Fiscal rules are meant to reassure markets, businesses and voters that public finances are on a stable path.
When they keep shifting, it signals that the government can’t stick to its own framework. Investors notice. So do international institutions. Trust doesn’t survive eleven rewrites.
2. It Raises Borrowing Costs
Markets demand higher interest rates when they think a country’s fiscal framework is written in pencil. That means higher debt-servicing costs - money that could have gone to schools, hospitals or tax cuts.
3. It Encourages Short-Termism
When fiscal rules are treated as temporary political tools - conveniently redefined before each election - the focus shifts from long-term investment to short-term optics.
Infrastructure, education and climate commitments all lose out to the next headline.
4. It Reduces Accountability
Rules are supposed to constrain behaviour. Changing them whenever they become inconvenient is the economic equivalent of moving the goalposts mid-match. It makes genuine accountability impossible.
5. It Signals Weakness, Not Flexibility
Occasionally adapting fiscal rules for extraordinary circumstances - a pandemic, a war - makes sense.
But doing it every couple of years just tells the world that you lack conviction. Rules that can’t survive a bad poll aren’t rules; they’re props.
And here’s the punchline:
Fiscal rules are supposed to be the guardrails of economic policy. But when the government keeps repainting the guardrails to match the mood of the day, the country inevitably starts to swerve.
So let’s call it what it is.
Not fiscal discipline. Not iron-clad anything.
Just The Art of Pretending to Be Serious - and we’ve all seen this performance too many times before.