474. Does Reeves' Budget Really Change Anything? What It Means For You

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Speaker 1 Hello and welcome to a live presentation where the rest is politics with me Alistair Campbell.

Speaker 2 And with me Rory Stewart.

Speaker 1 And we're talking about, as if you didn't guess, the budget. UK budget, as you called it on the podcast this morning, Rory.
Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, has just stood up in the House of Commons.

Speaker 1 We actually knew pretty well in advance a lot of the measures.

Speaker 1 We then knew all of them because shortly before she stood up, this document was by mistake published by the Office of Budget Responsibility. So she started off in a pretty foul mood, I would say.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, just to begin on this,

Speaker 2 famously, there was a moment where, if you leaked anything from the budget... You were out.
Yeah. What was this famous moment?

Speaker 1 Hugh Dalton, 1947. Right.
Yeah. He was on his way into the House House of Commons and a journalist said to him,

Speaker 1 by the time I write my story, you'll have delivered the budget. Can you just confirm something? And he confirmed it.
And he ended up having to resign.

Speaker 1 And other people have had to resign because of budget leakage.

Speaker 2 And the idea in those days was that if you got advanced information on the budget, you could profit from it on the market sensitivity.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well,

Speaker 1 the budget and the documents that go with it are... rammed full of market sensitive information which can move currencies, can move the markets.
And so that's why it's such a big deal.

Speaker 1 Added Added to which,

Speaker 1 the Chancellor's speech was preceded by the Deputy Speaker. And another bit of sort of arcane parliamentary procedure.
The speaker doesn't sit in for the budget.

Speaker 1 It's the deputy who is the chairman of Ways and Means.

Speaker 1 And she clearly, at the best of the Speaker, criticised and ticked off the government pretty severely for the sort of relentless leaking and briefing that had been about this budget.

Speaker 2 On the other hand, to defend Rachel Reeves, what she told us she was going to do, which was raise income touch, she decided not to do anyway. So all the leaks still fill off down the wrong path.

Speaker 2 And we were all making our investment decisions, otherwise, that she then

Speaker 2 got ferreted back again.

Speaker 1 Okay, we'll get on to that.

Speaker 1 Look, I think as we go through, we should sort of maybe, in our own minds, think about the various people that she was trying to project to, because there are different audiences on a day like this.

Speaker 1 Very importantly, over the long term, medium and long term, is the great British public who will follow it fairly closely. They'll get a sense of it.

Speaker 1 There are the MPs, in particular, her own MPs behind her, who cheered wildly at the end, but it looked like they were somewhat being forced to. And then you've got business.

Speaker 1 And I think on the day itself, maybe the most important audience, whether we like it or not, is the markets.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. Well, maybe we should go through those in sequence.
It's a very good idea. Let's begin.
I'll try to give a bit of a summary of what's happening.

Speaker 2 So she came in to office with a commitment, essentially sold by Keir Salma and Rachel Reeves, basically that they were not going to raise taxes and that their story was going to be growth.

Speaker 2 So they were coming in and the story was the Tories are incompetent, squandered a lot of money, but don't worry, we're not going to be the Labour Party that comes in and raises taxes.

Speaker 2 Instead, we're going to drive growth. And my guess is that's pretty close to what you came in with in 97.

Speaker 2 And so the playbook was pretty similar to Blair and Gordon Brown as the Chancellor then, which is this is new labour, so we're going to invest more, we're going to get the economy growing, but we're not going to do it by raising taxes and heading business.

Speaker 1 Added to which we said that we would stick to Tory spending limits for two years, and there was a little bit of that in the Labour approach as well.

Speaker 2 And so in a way, the sort of precedent is very important because it meant that, broadly speaking, from 1980 through to relatively recently, the British economy has been pretty stable in terms of its tax spend policies.

Speaker 2 policies because obviously you had the Thatcher and Major years, you had Brown and Blair who were quite fiscally responsible, might be one way of saying it, quite cautious with their spending.

Speaker 2 And then of course you had austerity. And now she takes over.
And this is the key point because she came in and decided or realized this big debate.

Speaker 2 You know, did she find a huge black hole that she had no idea about or not. In any case, it turned out that she was going to have to, in the last budget, borrow more and raise taxes more.

Speaker 2 Taxes in the last budget went up for about 40 billion. And she tried at the time to say, okay, there's a one-time thing.

Speaker 1 Tories are not coming back for more.

Speaker 2 Tories left a horrible mess. We've done it.
It's done.

Speaker 2 But over the last 12 months, unfortunately, it's become clearer and clearer that she probably would have to come back for more and probably have to come back for more.

Speaker 2 Because she certainly couldn't borrow anymore because she'd set fiscal rules that limits how much she can go out and borrow.

Speaker 2 Her backbenchers in the Labour Party weren't going to let her do the kind of cuts that she wanted to do. So she was going to have to raise taxes.

Speaker 2 And as I was making a slight joke of, it sounded as though she was going to raise income tax by a couple of pence, which would have been a huge move.

Speaker 2 You know, could have generated about £22 billion, although she was going to soften it by a move in the other direction. In the end, she didn't do that.

Speaker 2 She did raise taxes, though, by 26 billion, but she did it through a range of different measures. And the biggest one is that she

Speaker 2 froze the thresholds, which means that she's not technically increasing the nominal level at which you pay income tax, but as inflation kicks in, as your salary rises, you're more likely to enter those tax brackets.

Speaker 2 And the government would make in 2031 another 8 billion from that. She's also getting 4 billion out of...
things that used to be deductible on private pensions.

Speaker 1 Salary sacrifice pensions.

Speaker 2 Salary sacrifice pensions, which will make some people pretty cost because it'll mean that if you, and it doesn't affect the public sector, so potential grumble will be typical labor being nice to the public sector, but if you're in the private sector, you're going to lose tens of thousands of pounds from your public.

Speaker 1 And also, it's worth pointing out that that measure doesn't just affect pensions. That in fact, it affects more working people who put money into their pensions as a way, up till now, paying less tax.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 And then the thing that's been headlined a lot, but actually doesn't generate very much money is the

Speaker 2 mansion tax, which will pull in a few hundred million and will mean that if you own a property two million pounds, you will pay not actually very much, a few thousand pounds a year.

Speaker 1 And if you own a two and a half thousand years annually, but and she calls it a council tax surcharge, but I've been reading the documents trying to find out how that's going to be collected, whether it's down to local government, how so I think that I just thought that

Speaker 2 answer just come up, which is that she said it's going to come to the central government. It's the local councils aren't going to be allowed the council tax.

Speaker 1 Ah, okay.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 just briefly to go through the other tax taxes on property savings and and dividends, 2.1 billion. Corporation tax change, 1.5.

Speaker 1 Electric vehicles and a new mileage-based charge on battery EVs and plug-ins. Which goes in the face of the other.

Speaker 2 So very interesting. That's a difficult balance.
Just a small one on that. That might mean that

Speaker 2 some people are estimating 470,000 fewer vehicles will be sold, electric vehicles.

Speaker 2 On the other hand, people like Paul Johnson are pointing out that she needed to be brave on that because ultimately, if we shifted everyone to an electric vehicle fleet and only petrol vehicles were taxed, the government would have no revenue at all.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Gambling, changes to gambling tax, 1.1 billion.

Speaker 2 She was at pains to say this wouldn't affect something you were in favour of.

Speaker 1 Well, I am.

Speaker 1 But I suspect that it might lead. In fact, I think it's already started to lead to something of an exodus.
Some of the companies will be looking to go elsewhere.

Speaker 1 She was at pains to say it wouldn't affect horse racing. Then they've got this

Speaker 1 fuel fuel duty, some changes, tax administration and debt collection gets 2.3 billion.

Speaker 1 I think on the mansion tax, what's really interesting, there's been such a debate about this over years and years and years and years. Why take the pain for it for 0.4 billion? I know.

Speaker 1 And I think what's happened here is that having clearly at one stage, she was going to do these income tax rises.

Speaker 1 And then whether they tested them with the public or with MPs, I don't know.

Speaker 1 But then to change, so you've got all these, you've now set off all these different sectors and audiences that are going to come back and be, you know, pretty hacked off.

Speaker 1 So I guess the big question, so let's, let's just go through our audiences.

Speaker 1 Let's actually just start with the markets because they do seem to have reacted well. Although I saw.

Speaker 1 I saw one interview with one of the guys, you know, one of his big city offices, and he basically said, well, we don't care whether it comes through tax and spend, but what we do care about is seeing the bigger headroom.

Speaker 1 And And that's why the markets seem to have reacted quite well.

Speaker 1 She's increased the headroom, the sort of spare capacity as the stuff that goes wrong, from 9 billion to 22 as a result of raising the taxes the way she's done.

Speaker 2 And that's, I guess, to give her credit positive, because people were very worried if she left the headroom too tight, which is what she did last time.

Speaker 2 she would have to come back sooner or more likely to come back sooner. Although the OBR being the OBR still says there's a 50% chance roughly that she might have to come back for more.

Speaker 2 And that's just the OBR's way of saying it's very difficult to predict. On the markets, though, though, yes, you're completely right.
The markets, largely speaking, are happy.

Speaker 2 And if you were Zach Polanski, you would say...

Speaker 1 Out on leading on Monday.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Zach Polanski out leading on Monday. You'd say, typical, she's in hock to the bond markets.
The bond markets are driving everything.

Speaker 2 The Alistair Campbell of America, famously James Carvel, said he wanted to be reincarnated as the bond markets.

Speaker 1 Unlike

Speaker 1 his boss, Bill Clinton, who said he'd like to be reincarnated as a Detroit focus group because they had all the power.

Speaker 1 That's good.

Speaker 2 Whether it's the Detroit focus group or the bond markets, they certainly have a lot of power.

Speaker 1 But I think where Zach Polanski, and people can hear this on Monday, where I think he's being unreasonable, is that in the ideal world that he imagines, and that you and I might imagine, then they wouldn't have such power.

Speaker 1 But the truth is they do. If they had reacted, one of the lots of graphs flying around today.

Speaker 1 And one of the graphs against which some of the market reaction is set is what happened with Liz Truss and Hermini Budget. And this is nowhere near that.

Speaker 1 And this is actually, I think so far, the market reaction has been better than last year.

Speaker 2 Yes. So the bond markets, just to explain to people what this is, this is how the government borrows money.

Speaker 2 And a lot of that money is, in fact, paying fixed incomes to UK pensioners, to pension funds. So it's not all, as Zach Plansky sometimes likes to imply, sort of evil billionaires.

Speaker 2 Evil billionaires outside the United Kingdom. And the reason why it's particularly important at the moment is partly that we're borrowing a huge amount.
Our debt to GDP is about 100%.

Speaker 2 And we are spending currently £100 billion a year on servicing our debt interest.

Speaker 2 And if the bond markets get frightened, and how do they get frightened?

Speaker 2 Not in the case of Britain that we'd default, but if they got frightened that inflation would take place and the value of their bonds would be eroded, they'd start ramping up the interest rates.

Speaker 2 And that would be a big problem for the government, but a big problem also for people with mortgages, because that will all be passed on the mortgages. So

Speaker 2 she's right to be, well, no, no, right. There's a real reason why she's cautious about it.
And that's the reason why she wanted a balance of the books.

Speaker 2 It's also a reason why she didn't want to increase borrowing. But that in turn forced us towards tax rises.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And the threat is, I think it's important to emphasise that this threshold change, which is going to go on for at least three years, freezing the thresholds.

Speaker 1 So there's one of the many, many, many, many graphs. I'll just hold it up there, but you can see that as well.

Speaker 1 This is the graph of people who have been brought, the so-called fiscal creep, more and and more people being dragged into a top rate so the threshold stays the same you get a pay rise and suddenly you go from being a basic rate payer to a top rate taxpayer and so all of these things are going to get attacked from different quarters and I think the other thing that's that's worth pointing out in relation to the the OBR and I think it's important to emphasize and in a way this fiasco of whoever pressed the button early to publish this damn thing before it was meant to be and set up all sorts of craziness.

Speaker 1 The OBR,

Speaker 1 look, I think there should be a debate about the OBR. I think to some extent it has become way too important in our politics and our economics.

Speaker 2 So just quickly explain us. So the Office of Budget Responsibility set up by George Osborne theoretically as an objective independent monitor of whether the government was doing its job.

Speaker 2 And what Rachel Reeves has done is she's now created fiscal rules where the OBR's prediction about what's going to happen to the economy actually has to control her entire tax and spending.

Speaker 2 So although their predictions are not particularly better or different from any number of other predictions out there, they're baked in, as it were, to law.

Speaker 2 So the whole bond markets, again, keep coming back to the James Carville's bond markets govern this.

Speaker 1 And they've got, the other thing that's so frustrating about budget day, I'm trying to remember whether this is something that we exploited, to be absolutely frank, I think it probably is.

Speaker 1 Where you have, and Gordon Brown, brilliant politician,

Speaker 1 he could present a budget so well because he'd have a big argument, he'd pump it out there, you'd know what the message was.

Speaker 1 And by the time people had scrabbled around, read the red book and read all the papers that went with it, he was still driving the narrative.

Speaker 1 I think the trouble with this is you have the Chancellor's speech,

Speaker 1 you have this red book, which has the government kind of treasury version of the whole thing, and you have the OBR.

Speaker 1 And each one is just quite substantially different in tone, in the things that they emphasize. So it's only, for example, when I start reading through the OBR, I'll just get this.

Speaker 1 And this maybe should can take us to how the public might overtime.

Speaker 2 We're going to do public before business, or okay.

Speaker 1 Well, let's just,

Speaker 2 yeah, let's

Speaker 1 say

Speaker 1 the starting level of real household disposable income per person has been revised down relative to our March forecast by £150 in 2023 prices to £26,300 in 2024, 25.

Speaker 1 Our HDI, real household disposable income per person, is projected to grow more slowly over the forecast than in March.

Speaker 1 And so that's sort of, you know, you would not have got any sense of that from the speech that Richardson. Not at all.
Not at all.

Speaker 1 You had a sense because she kept saying that whereas we thought budget one, the big goal was growth. It now seems to be getting cost of living.

Speaker 2 Okay, so let's take a step back for a moment. So we've told listeners, hopefully, a little bit about what was...
in the budget.

Speaker 2 We've told listeners a little bit about why the bond markets in particular are reasonably happy and what the bond markets are.

Speaker 2 Give us a bit of a sense before we get on to business party and public, the drama of the event. You watched her speech, you watched Kemi Bade Knock's response.

Speaker 2 What was your sense about the whole way it was delivered?

Speaker 1 Well, it was chaotic at the start because you had this, this,

Speaker 1 you can't even call it a leak. It's not a leak.
It's a publication of one of the most important documents attached to the budget, which if you go to...

Speaker 2 Which was not supposed to come out before the budget.

Speaker 1 No, not supposed to come out until she's

Speaker 2 finished the speech.

Speaker 1 And so you can very, very quickly go to a page that tells you literally every single change and i remember this when i was in the house of commons because i would sit through all these budgets that you'd run to the the vote office yeah exactly and then you pick the thing up yeah exactly yeah yeah and you get this lovely document which you're now wandering around with now and then you'd get a copy of that as well yeah you handed out to you by the thing yeah so that was so before kiir starmer had finished prime minister's questions the media had cut away from kiersthma because they were sort of

Speaker 1 gobsmatched to be able to read on their phones and on their tablets. They were reading the budget.

Speaker 2 So then presumably the media went into a frenzy of speculation about why this thing had been leaked and it turns out to presumably to have been an accident.

Speaker 1 Somebody's

Speaker 1 absolutely ballsed up, which again, I think is there's something symbolic about that in relation to the OBR.

Speaker 1 And then the head of the OBR comes along to his press conference and just has this line to take that he sort of repeats robotically.

Speaker 1 Rachel Reeves then stands up and she starts by referring to this premature ejaculation of the budget all over the airwaves and is quite clearly quite angry you can see she's quite tense about the whole thing she then goes into the speech i thought she did okay on a pretty tough wicket and what was the fundamental message if you were a backbencher listening to it what were you hearing from her in that in that room well if you were a backbencher what you were hearing was that she was projecting a very labor budget right and so i think that's why at the end they were all doing that silly order paper waving and that's her talking about presumably tourists landed us in the mess we're fixing it we're cutting waiting lists.

Speaker 2 We're doing generations.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but there was also the big thing that got them going was that she did a big build-up. A big section of the speech was about scrapping the two-child

Speaker 1 benefit cap,

Speaker 1 which a lot of MPs have been campaigning for. Interestingly, the polling in that is you get a sense from the debate in the Labour Party that this is sort of massively popular.
Kemi Badenock actually

Speaker 1 talked about this being a budget for benefit street. She's clearly coming out as sort of very anti-welfare.

Speaker 1 But I'd say that the one thing, you know, we've talked a lot about Kier Starmer's got resilience. Rachel Reeves showed a lot of resilience today in that she was just sort of, she's quite punchy.

Speaker 1 Right. Anytime they came at her, she was, you know, she was pretty good with the comebacks.

Speaker 2 And then if you, let's say you were the public watching this, I don't know how much, how many of the public actually watched the life budget, but what sense would the public have got watching this, do you think?

Speaker 2 What message is Labour sending to the public?

Speaker 2 He talks about Gordon Brown's big argument. What do you think her big argument would be?

Speaker 1 Well, I think that is that is a problem with it.

Speaker 1 I think you'd get a lack of clarity about that with the public. I think that along the way, I mean, she did a very good line.

Speaker 1 She said at one point, the OBR report is not about 14 years of a Labour government. It's about 14 years of a Tory government.

Speaker 1 Now, there comes a point where people just get fed up of hearing you talk about the last law, even though I think it's a reasonable, fair thing to do, given the scale of the mess they left.

Speaker 1 I think the public would have had a sense of somebody, frankly, fighting hard. to project a sense of a forward plan for the economy.

Speaker 1 What I think you'd struggle to do, I mean, she talked about stability, stability, investment, reform. Yes.
The big sort of three pillars.

Speaker 2 Stability, investment reform. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And of course, the first time she mentioned stability, because of all the chaos at the start, the Tories all just sort of laughed at that. But she stuck to that, stability, investment reform.

Speaker 1 She said, she talked a lot about what she'd promised to do and said she was delivering it.

Speaker 1 And again, sometimes the Tories shouted back in a way that, frankly, I think with a Gordon Brown budget, maybe they wouldn't have done.

Speaker 1 And then, and come to the end, I think she sort of

Speaker 1 she was strong in the presentation. Yeah.
But I think the weakness with it was then exemplified by a pretty brutal attack by Kemi Badenock. Yeah, and it's interesting.

Speaker 1 I got messages from Labour MP saying, Kem is going way over the top, etc., etc., etc. And to some extent, she was, but it was brutal.

Speaker 2 It was, and I'm afraid, however unpleasant it felt in the house, it was one of the moments where Kemi Badenock, I think, has provided a very, very effective speech on television and social media.

Speaker 2 Because, of course, you can see that Rachel Reeves and the Foreign Secretary are both sitting, Vet Cooper are both sitting thinking, what on earth are you doing? You pick up a bit of that.

Speaker 2 But the speech, as delivered, was very confident, at times quite funny. She had her lines were, this is now Koenbay, not leader of the opposition, attacking.

Speaker 2 She managed to get them going on government spending up, welfare up, unemployment up, debt interest up.

Speaker 1 Don't you hate that when the NPS is going to be a bit more interesting? Absolutely.

Speaker 1 And then growth down, investment down, business confidence down, and the credibility of of the chancellor down right she had another another another i thought quite powerful line is that basically said gierstan was only clinging on to her because if she goes down he goes down with her look i thought it was you know as you know i've i've not been a massive fan of her parliamentary performances but but i thought that was a very strong performance i thought she's very powerful brutal yeah i mean even getting to the point of of mocking really mocking see you know she said the thing about you know we've talked a lot on the podcast about the press problems where she was rolling the pitch with that strange speech in Downey Street to Warner's Taxi.

Speaker 1 We're going,

Speaker 1 and Kevin Baydot was going, you know, oh, public service broadcasting, we're interrupting our taking of our Cheerios to have.

Speaker 1 And then she did this thing about, you know, all this whining about mansplaining. It's not mansplaining that people

Speaker 1 don't like you for. It's because you're completely useless.
It was brutal stuff.

Speaker 1 And her side seemed very, very, very. cheered up by that.

Speaker 1 But I think in terms of the public watching, I don't know what they'd have made of it in the end. It was interesting, just, you know, because I,

Speaker 1 before a big event like this, I sort of ping out a few messages to a few random people. If you're watching it, let me know what you think.

Speaker 1 And it was, there was quite a few sort of say, oh, do I have to

Speaker 1 miss that?

Speaker 1 Do I have to watch it?

Speaker 2 That's what we employ you for, Alistair. That's what everyone watching.

Speaker 2 You take the pain from the moment.

Speaker 1 I thought Rachel Reeves did. well on a really difficult wicket as a performance as a parliamentary performance.
But

Speaker 1 I think the papers tomorrow are going to be horrific for her.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 Because, and partly because I thought Kemi Baynock, you know, tax on sailors, tax on drivers, tax on sugar, tax on this, tax on that.

Speaker 1 And very much, and this is, she had this line of attack where she basically said that in order to appease your backbenchers,

Speaker 1 brackets, because you failed to take them forward on welfare reform, you've had to sort of throw them all this stuff, which is basically, and the rest of us have to pay tax for it. That was the

Speaker 2 and so this is an interesting moment for Kemi Baynock, who's really been struggling. I mean, the Tories are in a terrible position in the polls.
Reform are ahead of them.

Speaker 2 Tory MP, obviously, Danny Krueger, defected to reform. She's been under a huge amount of threat for her own leadership.
But what I think it means for the Conservatives is it is an opportunity.

Speaker 2 And this maybe takes us to the next theme that she raised, which is business

Speaker 2 to present themselves. or to try to present themselves as the party of business.

Speaker 2 So I was talking to Tory MPs and they're beginning again to say the kind of things that you would have been familiar with from the 80s.

Speaker 2 They're beginning to say there's only one person in the Labour cabinet with business experience. They don't really understand business.
You know, we're people who work in businesses.

Speaker 2 We understand what taxes mean for businesses. They will also be saying, and they'll start, and again, to get sort of technical jargon, they'll be getting back into pushing supply-side reforms.

Speaker 2 In other words, they will be pushing for more deregulation, more business-friendly policies, more tax cutting. And so they'll start presenting a more conventional mini austerity.

Speaker 2 Let's shrink the size of the state, have the private sector bigger.

Speaker 2 And the arguments that they'll be making are partly going to be based on the fact that the figures around the amount of tax, the amount of government spending as a proportion of our economy are pretty extraordinary.

Speaker 1 It's a record highlight, isn't it?

Speaker 2 I was just putting them together. So under Callahan in the 70s, Winter of Discontent, tax to GDP was about 34%.

Speaker 2 Under Margaret Thatcher, not very surprisingly, it drops down to about 28%.

Speaker 2 But perhaps what people don't really understand is that under your government, it was only at about 34%, May about 33%.

Speaker 2 Boris Johnson came in and started, for various reasons, spending like a drunken sailor, which is part of the problems going on a lot at this. And there was COVID.
And there was COVID.

Speaker 2 That's one of the things he was spending on. Went up to about 35%, but now it's up at 37%.

Speaker 2 And this is a level of the amount of tax being paid, it's part GDP, which has almost never happened in Britain.

Speaker 2 And if you are somebody thinking about growth, you would also notice that productivity is still flatlining. And the OBR, a little blue document over there,

Speaker 2 has basically got a sentence saying none of these measures in this budget we think are going to lead us to adjust our growth ball.

Speaker 1 We have revised down our assessment of medium-term

Speaker 1 productivity growth from 1.3% to 1%.

Speaker 1 There is a massive problem with productivity.

Speaker 1 The other things that

Speaker 1 triggered me was Brexit was mentioned once as one word when she was basically trying to say, this is down to stuff that happened on your watch to the Tories.

Speaker 1 So Brexit, COVID, she mentioned Brexit, austerity, Brexit, COVID, she mentioned.

Speaker 1 If Brexit is the disaster for the economy that it's been, why are we not doing more to fix it?

Speaker 1 And you talked about the, I think the problem the Tories have, you're right, listen, she was much more effective today than she has been. But they have a real visibility problem in in this.

Speaker 1 So, Nigel Farage,

Speaker 1 I had two channels on in the background. Nigel Farage's press conference was his presentation was done live.

Speaker 1 Mel Stride apparently strode into the briefing room and there was hardly anybody there. And that's because the media has decided reform are more interested than the Tories.

Speaker 1 I think you should have rested that back a bit. But I think, you know, I think you as a tribal Tory, obviously, Rory, I think you're kidding yourself a little bit if you think this is going to sort of

Speaker 1 change that dynamic too much.

Speaker 2 Another thing that's interesting for me as a tribal Tory

Speaker 2 is that when all's said and done, if you were to step back, I think, look back at it from 10 years' time, it's not the most interesting budget in the world.

Speaker 2 It's a terrible thing to say to people who are watching us live. But I called my friend David Gawk,

Speaker 2 who was the Chief Secretary of the Treasury and absolutely core of George Osborne's team.

Speaker 2 So very, very much part of the austerity neoliberal economic consensus and said, you know, what's wrong with this budget and what would you do differently?

Speaker 2 And without being unfair to David, I didn't get a great deal back. I mean, he had some ideas.

Speaker 2 You know, he said, you know, he would have been a bit more cautious about what was happening on the minimum wage.

Speaker 2 He would have thought a little bit about taking on some of the nuclear recommendations, thinking about the triple lock pension.

Speaker 2 But the message I got from that is this is not enormously different from the kind of budgets that Jeremy Hunt or Rishi Sunak would have brought through.

Speaker 2 I I mean, there are different types of Conservative budgets you could have seen, right? It's not George Osborne. It's not let's cut spending.
It's not Liz Truss, let's cut taxes and not fund it.

Speaker 2 It's not Boris Johnson, let's spend like a drunken sailor. It's a pretty mainstream, middle-of-the-road treasury budget.
And I guess the problem with your business is it's not remotely radical.

Speaker 2 I mean, there's nothing in this which really makes you think radical deregulation, radical change, which is suddenly going to make...

Speaker 1 Radical new approach to fixing the massive Brexit.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, absolutely. Let's rejoin the customs union.
Let's, you know, you would push for a second referendum, but that, or what have we really got to do to fix this productivity problem?

Speaker 2 I mean, it's all about productivity.

Speaker 2 As you've often pointed out, if productivity had remained at the levels that it was at from late Thatcher through Gordon Brown, we'd be about 30% richer than we are.

Speaker 2 As it is, productivity is flatlined. And sadly, the OBR is saying this is not a budget that's going to change that because there's nothing here which really makes.

Speaker 2 So, what are the things that Britain could have done for business? And then I'll hand back to you on the other stuff. There could have been much more dramatic move to reduce energy costs.

Speaker 2 Energy costs are very high for households. They're very high for business.

Speaker 2 And there's been some calculations that actually it's imposing a three pound cost on the economy and only getting a one pound revenue to the treasury, the way that this energy costs are done.

Speaker 1 So hold on, but the first

Speaker 1 line of it that of the executive summary is they claim they're taking £150 off energy bills on average from April next year. I've not read the kind of detail on that.

Speaker 1 So they say they are doing something for households.

Speaker 2 Right. So questions about how that works and what happens to the carbon pricing and how that happens for businesses.

Speaker 2 And that's going to be vital because if we're going to be in, if Britain is trying to compete on AI and it wants data centers, these data centers eat energy like you can't believe.

Speaker 2 So how are you going to have cheap electricity? There could have been other things they could have done. They could have replaced stamp duty with property tax.

Speaker 2 We talked about David Gawk was talking about triple lock pension. This is a big, big problem.
More and more money is going to old people.

Speaker 2 But the fundamental thing that they didn't do is they didn't deal with the fact that Britain is now a complete outlier in the world on the relationship, weirdly, between the amount of tax paid by people on the lowest incomes, the amount of people paid by tax on the highest incomes.

Speaker 2 The amount of tax paid by people on lower incomes in the United Kingdom is very, very similar to that of the United States.

Speaker 2 The amount of tax paid by people on higher incomes is much more similar to people in Scandinavia.

Speaker 2 So we have this very odd situation where we're spending like a Scandinavian country, but most of the income is coming from the top. So the top 10% pay 60% of all the income tax revenue.
The top 1%

Speaker 2 pay 28% of the entire income tax.

Speaker 1 Of those who pay.

Speaker 2 Of those who pay. The top 0.1% are paying well over 5%, maybe as much as 10%

Speaker 2 of the revenue that's going to be.

Speaker 1 That's a progressive tax system.

Speaker 2 It is a progressive tax system, but it's a very odd one. Britain is now right out even of the Scandinavian average.

Speaker 2 If you were a Scandinavian, if you were Sweden or Denmark, and you were trying to run a state the size of Britain, yes, the very rich pay a lot of tax, but ordinary people also shoulder their share of the tax, but they have to.

Speaker 1 But the tax threshold change is the, and I'm not saying this is not necessarily good politics, but that is what that is going to do.

Speaker 2 It's going to bring more people into the taxes.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think the other thing that's worth saying about that. So, look, this is the choice that Britain doesn't.
has never really wanted to face up to. We go on about Scandinavian public services.

Speaker 1 When we had Hella Thorning Schmidt, their their former prime minister on the podcast and she would say look sometimes i look at your public service how did how did the public put up with this with all the tax do you pay yeah they pay a lot of tax and they get very good public services yeah the problem i think for any government today is we're paying a lot of tax but we're not getting necessarily the world-class public services that we should get for it which brings us to the question of reform not the political party no but but her first

Speaker 2 stability investment reform correct right so there is a big problem productivity and a lot of that is sadly in the public sector We talked in previous podcasts about the fact that we're getting in a lot more doctors, a lot more nurses, but we're not seeing the productivity improvements in the NHS.

Speaker 2 We're seeing waiting lists come down, but there's an amazing figures that, you know, we're getting in in some fields, 20, 30% more people. What the public is seeing is going up by 7, 8%.

Speaker 2 The productivity is coming dramatically down.

Speaker 2 So one question, I guess, is could Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves become the real government of reforming and changing these things.

Speaker 2 And there brings me to your third category, which is the labour-backbenchers, because a lot of the sort of stuff that you might want to do if you were more on the kind of tribally Tory side, you know, cut government spending, improve productivity and public services, will have a lot of screams and protests from people who the labour-backbenchers are very sympathetic with.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think one thing Gordon used to do is he was very good at name-checking colleagues and ministers. She did a lot of constituency name-checking,

Speaker 2 which always cheers everyone up. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 So thanks to the representations of the mp for x i've decided to do why even with um george osborne's omni-shambles budget i enjoyed that yeah exactly you loved that one that was a pasty text but at the time most of us were shouting and cheering and waving our order papers because we were all getting sort of little tidbits for our constituency he was announcing for the 15th time that the a66 was going to be jewelled and well she did a lot of that the the big moment for the backbenchers really looking like they were embracing the whole thing was the the two-child benefit cap getting rid of that but along the way there there was lots she had some very good kind of quite punchy attack lines against the against the conservatives but i i think that the i think the i think this will have settled the plp for a bit but i think you know they they know just how fragile the situation is right now because you are as you said earlier you're talking about government that came in promising growth it hasn't really happened and that's clear from the report did the word i mean Presumably, the argument, without sounding too much like Gordon Brown's, should have been logically growth, not stability, investment, reform, but growth, growth, growth, that stability, investment, reform are the things that produce growth, but the argument is about growth.

Speaker 1 Well, that's why the business reaction, I mean, you know, nobody can say what the business reaction is.

Speaker 1 You talk about thousands of different people and organizations, but the sense I've had so far is of them actually thinking this is actually Ray Newton Smith, who's the

Speaker 1 head of the CBI,

Speaker 1 said

Speaker 1 this is a budget for stability, not for growth.

Speaker 1 And look, we've been saying this for ages if you would if growth is the thing then you have to bend every aspect of policy towards that right and that's why when you do sort of put further regulation in or further taxes on business national insurance etc you may have a perfectly sound political argument for it but you have to be able to say why that relates to your broader growth agenda at the moment in budget two of a labor government they're essentially saying that they're doing this because they're still on the getting the foundations right getting the stability before they go for growth yeah and i think that what the next stage has to have is this sense absolutely of go for growth yeah otherwise where are they going to end up because as you say the fundamentally all problems are solved by productivity and growth right otherwise she's stuck in this impossible question all the time of am i going to cut spending am i going to raise taxes am i going to raise borrowing if she can get productivity and growth naturally the revenue of the government will go up you'll be back in the happier situation that you guys guys were in from 97 onwards, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 One of the bits that I was reading

Speaker 1 ahead of the budget once this report got pre-published was the chapter.

Speaker 1 I think this is always worth looking at in the OBR report: risks and uncertainties.

Speaker 1 Key risks to our economy forecast include productivity growth, and that's where they set that out, bank rate and guilt yields, UK equity prices.

Speaker 1 And then key risks to the medium-term fiscal forecast include

Speaker 1 local authority borrowing has increased by around seven billion a year in this forecast compared to March, reflecting recent upward revisions to outturn and financial pressures from the costs of special educational send.

Speaker 1 Goodness.

Speaker 2 And well, sorry, sorry, can I just push back on this?

Speaker 1 And that wasn't mentioned at all.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting.
And I, and insofar as some of that cost is falling on London councils, they may also be a bit cross that they're not getting the revenue on the council taxes uplift.

Speaker 1 So, so, so that I thought that was, and then in the same paragraph, same page, other spending risks include the impact of the NHS budget of further strikes, negotiations over pharmaceutical spending, the assumption that the Home Office will reduce small boat arrivals and end the use of hotel for asylum seekers by mid-2028 and deliver savings of 1.1 billion.

Speaker 1 So sort of indicating there we're not 100% sure that's going to happen.

Speaker 1 The unfunded cost of digital ID cards at a provisional cost of 0.6 billion and the commitment for defence spending to reach 3.5% of GDP by 2035, which will cost an additional 32 billion.

Speaker 1 So they're basically saying there, yes, there's much more headroom, but there are these other factors that maybe haven't properly been costed in.

Speaker 1 And the point about defence, there was one I was watching on the Parliament channel, and there was a cutaway to John Healy when she started talking about defence, and it lasted about five seconds.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 You know, I was really hoping today there was going to be a big

Speaker 1 thing about Ukraine, it was

Speaker 2 no,

Speaker 2 there isn't, because I'm afraid the truth of the matter is that a lot of the commitments are set forward in time. As you say, they're sort of 2035 commitments.

Speaker 2 And in real terms, British defence spending isn't really going up in the immediate term, and most of the money is going to be hoovered into our nuclear weapons programme.

Speaker 2 So there actually isn't going to be money available for half the things that you would hope the British government would spend money on to protect itself against Russia-Ukraine.

Speaker 2 I think another example of something that she missed, which she could have done, is there was a very interesting report that which many listeners will have heard about, but not all, by a man called fingleton who produced a report on nuclear and it's a really really interesting report because nuclear is going to be absolutely at the center of the government's strategy needs to be because it's not emitting carbon but it's generating energy which acts as backup for wind and solar so we're going to be building these big nuclear power stations and we've announced them hinkley size well etc he's pointing out that our nuclear power build is the most expensive in the world and he thinks that almost all of this is about regulation and this is a a good deregulation story for a bold government.

Speaker 2 He gives an example that there are stronger restrictions on workers being exposed to radiation in a nuclear plant than on doctors and dentists going near the similar form of radiation in a doctor's surgery or a dentist's surgery.

Speaker 2 And he says that just fixing these, and he lays out an enormous amount of these things, could save tens of billions of pounds a year.

Speaker 2 This was a real opportunity for a government to say, it's not true that we don't believe in deregulation.

Speaker 1 And I heard her mention the name, but what was said about that?

Speaker 2 So there was a funny ambiguity because there's a statement saying, well, we're looking at the recommendations, what the Treasury said when it first came out.

Speaker 2 Then there's a statement on paper saying they accept the recommendations in principle. But I would say it's a huge open goal to say, yes, absolutely.
We're embracing this stuff. We're going with it.

Speaker 1 Rui, you know how we love our votes. Oh, yes.

Speaker 1 Whilst we've been talking, one of our marvelous team created a poll

Speaker 1 of the people who are list the, is this Rachel Reeves' last budget? Yes, 45%, no, 55%. Oh, so there you go.

Speaker 2 So, so just over half of our left-leaning listeners think Rachel Reeves should remain the chancellor.

Speaker 1 You think they're all left-leaning?

Speaker 2 Well, I think pretty, pretty much.

Speaker 2 Hopefully, I'm converting them step by step.

Speaker 1 I had a couple of people on the tube down here today who were very, very far from being left-wing. Oh, good.
And who are absolutely.

Speaker 2 Well, I hope my new push for this deregulation, small government, pro-business,

Speaker 1 get stuck into Europe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, is that a lot of people?

Speaker 2 And clearly, winning them more.

Speaker 2 Here's one more thing, and this will be my last sort of big point on the budget. Minimum wage has gone up.

Speaker 2 So minimum wage in 2015, the UK minimum wage was, as it were, 48.7 when the OECD average was 51.3. 10 years later, the OECD average is 51.
It hasn't changed, but the UK has gone from 48.7 to 61.1.

Speaker 2 And even even the Resolution Foundation seems to be a little bit wary about what the government's doing on the minimum wage.

Speaker 2 Again, businesses will be worrying about that because it becomes more and more expensive.

Speaker 2 Now, I can't see the questions because you have the laptop.

Speaker 1 So I can completely control the narrative.

Speaker 1 In fact, the first question is about a narrative. Oscar and you, how do labour reclaim the narrative on the economy?

Speaker 1 The budget may well reflect macroeconomic trends, but the right-wing newspapers will surely play this as Reeves punching down. I did an event at a theatre last night about the play punch.

Speaker 1 And one of the questions, we're talking about criminal justice reform, and one of the questions was somebody on the panel, including Jacob Dunn,

Speaker 1 the real guy who we've interviewed on Leader this week with James Graham, the playwright.

Speaker 2 Just to explain for this, Jacob Dunn is a man who, as a young man, punched somebody and killed them, an unprovoked punch. They died from a single punch.

Speaker 1 He was put into prison and his uh the family of the victim then reached out went through a very complicated process of uh understanding and actually forgiveness a very wonderful moving play yeah and and anyway you were on the yeah and i so i saw it again last night and afterwards there was this this panel i was on it with him and a woman called alice who ran this switchback charity which is about sort of helping uh people coming out of prison not to reoffend and they both said that part of the problem is that so many politicians put their policy through what they call the daily mail test and so that sean fletcher who was in who was chairing it he said to me is that a thing and i said i said well it it was kind of a bit of a thing not just the mail but the media more generally 20 odd years ago but now it needn't be a thing because even though the papers still they are very right-wing they will say the budget is terrible but politicians i think underestimate the power they have to do difficult things and see them through yeah well let me push back a little bit on the gentleman asking the question oscar oscar yeah because i i agree with him that there'll be a right-wing media media narrative but I also think it's a bit defeatist to say this is all driven by macroeconomic conditions I mean if if Rachel Reeves and her supporters are really trying to say essentially she has no choice that the whole kind of macro economy of the globe and goodness knows what I don't know COVID and crisis and the Tories mean that she has no room for movement she did that's no good at all yeah okay you'll you'll prefer this one Stephen Lambden I'm a centrist dad trip plus member who believes Rory is the best prime minister we've never had so you like that bit What in the budget will convince my well-qualified children that they should stay here and not work abroad?

Speaker 1 They should stay here and fight for a better Britain, Stephen. Well, but I think it's a good question.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think if you're a young person listening to this, what you want to hear is a sense of hope and a sense of direction.

Speaker 2 And I'm afraid stability investment reform doesn't quite, I mean, maybe it trips off the thumb, but it doesn't quite make me think. This is a country that's going places.

Speaker 2 I don't want to go to Singapore. I don't want to go to Dubai.
I don't want to move to the US. I want to be here in Britain.

Speaker 1 It's interesting.

Speaker 1 One of the people I said, feed me in your thoughts as soon as you have them is an economist. And he said he thought that

Speaker 1 reading through, he thought they were making a pitch to young people. Higher minimum wage, freezing rail fares, free training for apprenticeships for small businesses.
I thought that was a good move.

Speaker 1 And this is the point about budgets. There's so much in them.
And it does take a few days to kind of before

Speaker 1 they settle down. Ollie Richards, on the other hand, does this budget feel like another fiscal event where young people are completely ignored?

Speaker 1 And then another poll we've done, Roy. God, they're very busy, our teammates.
I don't know how they're doing this. You think you know our listeners.
Have a guess on this one.

Speaker 1 Is the triple lock on pensions sustainable? No v yes.

Speaker 2 I would say no, 72%.

Speaker 1 Not bad, 83.

Speaker 1 I'm 100. I'm 100.

Speaker 1 I just think it is. Well, how is it? Give me the argument for the triple lock.

Speaker 2 Well, I suppose the argument is that people have worked hard all their lives.

Speaker 2 They are at their oldest and most vulnerable, that being poor in old age is absolutely miserable because your life is getting, you're getting weaker and frailer all the time.

Speaker 2 And younger people have their whole lives ahead of them and we have an obligation to the old.

Speaker 1 Okay, we also, but we have an obligation to the young. And at the moment, they're the first generation to grow up poorer than the generation that went before them.

Speaker 2 There's actually an interesting bit of good news in the macroeconomic data for young people, given that we've had a couple of questions about young people, which is that actually the cost of housing in real terms has been falling very, very dramatically, and nobody's really picked up on this.

Speaker 2 People like Torsen Bell, who's the junior treasury minister from the Resolution Foundation, has really made a lot of his career out of fury about the fact that it's very difficult for young people to get more housing that house prices in Britain have collapsed in real terms and some of them even in nominal terms.

Speaker 2 The price of a house in Britain is now below where it was in 2007.

Speaker 2 on average. Meanwhile, real incomes have gone up.

Speaker 1 So actually, in some ways, maybe the Zach Polanski voters of the future won't feel quite the sense of burning injustice that people of torston bells generation have got okay okay niam from trip plus member from cumbria oh brilliant it seemed like the tories had an open goal in their response to the budget they could have focused on the numbers economic effect how worse off people would be under the tax increases to score themselves political points instead this is really interesting given what we just said instead kemi badenot launched an appalling scathing personal attack on ries which i find very disappointing has this proved that the tories are the party of the bullies?

Speaker 2 Well, there we are.

Speaker 2 Well, I certainly think that.

Speaker 2 I mean, it was tough. I certainly think aggressive politics is increasingly divisive.

Speaker 2 I think there's very different responses to it. There are people who will think that's strength, that's what we like to see, and there are people who will be like, oh, that's not unpleasant.

Speaker 2 Partly, because we wouldn't tolerate it in the workplace, I guess.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And she had that line, you know, and may I say to you, woman to woman.

Speaker 2 That was coming out of the back of the mansplatering.

Speaker 1 The mansplate, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 There's one here, djr working age disability claims are soaring taxing more without talent flight is delusional brexit style arrogance are we waiting for an argentina style crisis and shock therapy what do you propose we're not that bad are we no no no no we're definitely not no no i think the the the the bottom line is this was a pretty dull budget

Speaker 2 it's quite difficult to think of much to say if you're zach polanski you would say she should have been much more radical she should have borrowed more and screw the bond market and if you're Liz Truss, you would have said, let's cut taxes.

Speaker 1 Oh, Liz Trust has opined.

Speaker 2 Free up visits.

Speaker 1 Possibly the most wooden social media post I've ever seen in my life. She'll put it in the news there.
Now, here,

Speaker 1 maybe this is a good one to end on because you think you know our listeners and viewers so well. They've done another poll.
Where are you on the political spectrum? Don't look.

Speaker 1 They've been given the choice of left, centre, and right.

Speaker 2 Where are we on the political sector? Left, center, and right. Okay.
I think they will put themselves 63% center.

Speaker 1 Oh, interesting. 41% left, 48% centre, 10% right.

Speaker 2 There we are. So I'm speaking here to the 10%.

Speaker 2 Pull over the 10%.

Speaker 2 Pull over the 10%. And I guess, look, here's another thing that

Speaker 2 I think has been missed totally. I spent this morning recording this AI miniseries that we're doing for Trip Plus members.
And AI is the biggest economic story in the world.

Speaker 2 If AI is rolled right the way through British companies in the way that the champions of AI believe it could be in the next two, three years, there will be an enormous number of job losses.

Speaker 2 If it isn't rolled through British companies, but it's rolled through Chinese and American companies that are directly competing with British companies, then we're going to lose an enormous amount of value because our life sciences, our services, our professional services companies are going to be hoovered up by American AI companies, right?

Speaker 2 So somewhere in this budget a really bold chancellor would be thinking much more front and center about ai because i think by the time the next election the one thing that will have blown all the obr forecasts out of the water either positively or negatively either in productivity growth or collapse is going to be artificial intelligence but this was a budget that basically could have been delivered by theresa may well that's a pretty harsh final judgment oh no she's the one that's one of the and she's your hero

Speaker 1 yeah I, yeah, if I had one big picture criticism, and I, you know, I don't want it to keep going about Gordon Brown and Tony Blair back in the day, but I think were they doing this budget today, artificial intelligence would have been at the heart of it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because they would have loved that stuff.

Speaker 1 They'd have said this is.

Speaker 2 Blair's fascinated Brown's fascinating.

Speaker 1 Economic change, economic challenge. How do we get ahead? I don't think it was even mentioned.
The second thing, as I say, that was barely mentioned was defence.

Speaker 2 I mean, she said the thing about we've got to stand by ukraine and that's why we're putting more into defence but you know the budget is an opportunity to project some big messages and the third thing that i thought was another elephant in the room was i'm afraid yet again brexit which has taken a very large chunk out of the economy and out of our productivity and sorry my point about terrisume is that this is a budget could have been delivered in 2017 and that relates to your point right it doesn't reflect what i mean by that is it feels like it could have happened almost 10 years ago in terms of the fact it isn't challenging what happened around brexit it's not recognizing the way in which Russia's actions on the Ukraine border has changed things, it's not recognizing Donald Trump and the way he's changed the whole global order, and it's not recognizing AI.

Speaker 1 Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 So, Rory Stewart gives it eight out of ten.

Speaker 1 Thank you, everybody, for watching and listening. And we'll see you again soon.

Speaker 2 See you very soon. Thanks again.
Bye-bye.

Speaker 2 As the year draws to a close, it's time for our annual reminder that even in an age of political noise and division, one national consensus still stands firm. Roast potatoes.

Speaker 1 Oh, God, all this British stuff.

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