Budget Hot Take: Has Chancellor Rachel Reeves saved herself? | LIVE reaction

0:07So welcome to our political currency budget hot take and whether you are watching this live now on YouTube or catching up this evening on our normal political political currency.

0:30and reflected upon what was in the budget, all of the detail. But this is our first budget hot take. Yeah. Actually, it takes me back, doesn't it, to kind of when you're in opposition and you have to kind of digest the budget really quickly and flick through the red book, which is the budget document that Treasury produces, look at the OBR forecast and document these days, although we all had a couple of hours jump on that because they inadvertently put it up online, which will be one of the big stories of Budget Day. And maybe we'll just start, shall we, with our overall impressions, your impression, my impression of the budget.

1:06And then we're going to get into some of the specifics and the things that jumped out at us. I mean, maybe I'll go first. I mean, you know, I thought very much this was a budget for Labour MPs written by the Parliamentary Labour Party, rather than a budget aimed at even Labour voters, let alone kind of trying to get the British economy going. and therefore was sort of quite off strategy. It was not where I think Rachel Reeves would have wanted to start the year. And I guess the headline, and I should say I thought she delivered it with confidence and spirit, but the headline really is that she's increasing taxes to increase benefits because if you look in the figures, there hasn't been the big downgrade to the forecast that everyone's been talking about for months.

1:56The OBR did not really take a big chunk out of her plans for reasons we can get into. And so she was sort of left with this situation where she didn't actually have to do that much. But she decided that she was going to go ahead with these tax rises and the bulk of the money was used to get rid of the two-child limit, which I introduced as Chancellor. So we'll come on and talk about that. But that seems to me the sort of central decision in the budget. And it kind of, I guess, begs a question, which we can also come on to, which is why did we spend the last two months in this kind of fevered speculation that there was going to be a big hole in the budget?

2:36She was going to put up income tax rates. And on the day, that hasn't happened. And we're left with, therefore, quite a sort of kind of classic sense left wing budget, put up taxes on everyone to pay for higher benefits. I think, look, it was definitely a hugely political performance from Rachel Reeves. And, you know, we'll see how this develops over the next 24, 48 hours. But on the OBR point first, if you watch the television between 12 and 1230 today, when the BBC and Sky had got this leak of the whole OBR document, 200 pages, all of the information on the budget measures and the forecast, all the fiscally sensitive information.

3:24I mean, amazingly, the BBC on BBC Two didn't go to Prime Minister's questions. They were telling everybody what was in the budget before the budget was announced. George Parker, the editor of the Financial Times, did a tweet before 12.30 saying, I've just finished writing the Financial Times budget splash. And that's even before the Chancellor has stood up in the House of Commons. My sense, though, is, you know, it didn't actually change very much. Clearly, destabilised journalists, destabilised Parliament a little. And there will be huge postmortems. Although, you know, Ken Clarke in 96, you, George, know what it's like to have a post-mortem about a budget reaction.

4:03I slightly thought she missed a trip. What she ought to have said, rather than being angry, is she should have said, Rachel Reeves, in the chamber at 12.30, that she felt terribly sorry for the poor junior OBR official who had pressed the wrong button. And they'll be hugely fearful for their future. And they should rest assured we all make mistakes. In the end, though, the world moves on. And in terms of... I mean, just on that, Ed, I mean, the fact that there was no... Because everything had come out before in the press, what was going to be in the budget, you know, it didn't reveal the OBR leak, some white rabbit that she was going to pull out of the hat at the end of the speech, was it?

4:43So it would have had more impact if there was some big surprise she had. That's right. Big theatrical surprise. So as a result, it had less political impact than it might have done on another budget day. and the interesting thing you know rachel reeves has clearly decided she doesn't like big surprises and she wants everything to be out in advance which is kind of slightly jars with the idea of budget purder the advantage of that of course it's going really well then the fact it's already announced is is is fine because you just get the plaudits but if as it's been the case in the last two or three weeks it's been kind of totally chaotic i think the one thing she really needed was a big rabbit out of the hat, and she didn't have one there.

5:25It was very much for Reeves' Chancellor of Performance because there was a lot of I, there was a lot of my choices, there was a lot of only I can do this, doubling down on that message which you've seen in the last few weeks saying that only I can keep the markets on side. There will be more redaction, just to explain what this means for people. The Treasury and civil servants will put out a version of the budget speech They will black out any sections of the speech which are political, party political, and that's called redacting. I think in our time at the Treasury, there would have been basically no redactions in Gordon Brown's budget speeches.

6:06I don't remember you doing many redactions. Almost all of this budget speech will be redacted because it was so aggressively political. And as you said, if your problem is the people behind you and you need to keep them on side, then you go heavy political. But if you're trying to persuade the newspapers, the swing voters, the wider public, when it's that partisan, you know, I think it makes it a bit harder. So, as you said, she made that decision and maybe she needed to make that decision, but it's not without costs. I think, though, as I said earlier, we're going to come back and look at lots more detail tomorrow.

6:50She had her own tests of cost of living, the National Health Service getting the debt down. There was clearly a markets test. Will this stabilise the British economy? There is a sort of test. Will this deliver the growth plan she needs? And then there is a test. Will this deliver for Rachel Reeves and turn around what has been a pretty torrid period? I think on the first on the markets, they basically pass the test. Almost no financial market reaction to this budget, even with that OBR leak. It was a little bit wobbly for that 10 minutes. But in the end, nothing has changed. Of course, these things sometimes take time to sink in.

7:31And there may be measures which unravel, but at the moment, it looks quite calm. She is meeting her fiscal rules by the end of the period. She's doubled the amount of margin by which she's going to meet her fiscal rules. So this is a little bit more cautious. But as you said, what's fundamentally gone on here is that the OBR, for all the talk of them doing a huge downgrade to the forecast, They did a downgrade to the underlying view of growth and then hugely upgraded the amount of money they think is coming in in taxation from any percentage point of growth. And the result is there wasn't really a problem with the OBR forecast.

8:08And what we've really seen here is a huge rise in taxation in order to pay for a bit more margin and a lot more spending on in particular on welfare. So in that sense, it's a pretty classic tax and spend budget. But I think if you're the markets, you would think, well, you know, the tax rises don't happen until year three. There's a few hidden problems in there, you know, around the spending assumptions look quite low after the spending review finished. In 2930, 3031, there's suddenly big cuts in public spending. There's a sort of a bit of a black hole, which the OBI identifies around SEND spending, which is special needs spending for children, which ends up being about£5 billion a year they've got to find.

8:54Fuel duty, they're continuing to kick that can down the road. But fundamentally, she's met the fiscal rules with margin and the markets are going to shrug their shoulders. Yeah, I think that's broadly right. There's not been a financial market reaction. Now, most budgets, there isn't a financial market reaction. We've just got used to in this kind of new era that there might well be, and there hasn't been. And I guess that's markets reassured that she is committed to these fiscal rules. She restated that day. We knew she would. And that, you know, the measures that she announced are broadly credible and that she's not in immediate danger, nor is the prime minister of resigning or being forced out.

9:39so I think sort of nothing to see here on the financial market front should we turn then to the what about the impact on the economy maybe we should for those who you know haven't actually caught the budget just mention a couple of the sort of headline measures and then see what that does for the overall economic performance of the government so she froze the income tax and national insurance thresholds for another three years. Rishi Sunak had already frozen them, I think, for seven years. So this is a very, very long freeze in the thresholds. And that's doing a lot of the work, by the way, as you say, to raise the current freeze, the Sunak freeze, is one of the reasons why the public finances haven't deteriorated in the way that people would expect it, because inflation is a bit higher.

10:29And so more money is coming in from tax receipts, thanks to the freeze. and the productivity downgrade, which you referred to, is offset basically by higher wages and higher inflation leading to higher tax receipts. The overall impact is only that there's a£6 billion hole. That£6 billion sounds a lot to people, but in the scheme of the Treasury, it's not. So she throws the thresholds for another three years. We'll come on to the politics of that because it's something she previously said she wouldn't do. She abolished the two-child limit on welfare, which we talked about, which we've heavily anticipated but she went for the whole hog, didn't she?

11:09She introduced a mansion tax in effect or two higher council tax bans for homes worth over£2 million. She put a charge on electric vehicles. She taxed higher pension contributions. She actually, somewhat surprisingly, I don't think it was anticipated, she increased the income tax and national insurance on pensions and dividend tax. and there were lots of other smaller things which actually raised quite a lot of money which she didn't make much of but things like change to some of the writing down allowances for businesses raises a lot of money freezing student loan thresholds raises quite a lot of money um i mean the overall impact on the economy and the sort of plan for growth i would say is next to nothing.

11:57I mean, there was measure, to be fair to her, she didn't talk about some of the industrial policy, more money for transport, but there was nothing really significant, no big new supply side reform to the economy, no huge increase in capital investment beyond what was announced last year. So I think we'll come back to what this means for the politics, but in terms of the economics of the country, this is not really going to move the needle on GDP, is it? And I don't think she claimed it would. The only thing she did claim it did was that it reduced the forecast inflation by 0.4%, which she's very proud of, and I guess would address the kind of quotes cost a living challenge that she set herself.

12:47That's right. I think, though, compared to past budgets, and this partly goes to your observation of how political and backbench orientated it was. I don't remember a chancellor spending so little time talking about the international economy and the broader global context, even though that's clearly massively important for Britain at the moment. And in her press conference in Downing Street a couple of weeks ago, that's what she really focused on. And secondly, there was very little directed at business and the growth strategy. Very little talk about incentives for investment or what the growth plan was.

13:27And there was a small number of capital spends here and there, but they don't really add up to a huge amount. There wasn't a kind of decisive push in those things. I don't remember a chancellor being less business growth orientated. Then when you move to the forecast, so growth is downgraded, the overall growth number every year for the next five years. You're right, inflation is less next year, but overall, inflation stays a bit higher over this period. But I think the significant thing in their forecast is what she said about, or what the OBR says about incomes. Real household disposable income, this is the income that everybody will get and feel.

14:14real household is a disponible income per person is now projected to grow more slowly. It grows by 3 % last year, 2024-25, down to half a percent this year, quarter percent in 26-27, and then averages quarter percent a year for the rest of the forecast. That is well below, the OBR says, the last decade's average of just under 1%. So the last decade, household incomes were growing just under one percent and everybody said that is a huge squeeze on people's incomes and that one percent is now going to fall to a quarter of a percent so that underlying growth um slowdown for the uk is then reflected in what is a real uh a very tight household disposable income growth and um and of course alongside that you've got taxes rising now Within that forecast, there is a small increase in borrowing in the next two or three years.

15:17As I said, the fiscal tightening happens late, but I don't think people will think that's hugely significant. There is a small tick up in migration, which contributes to growth, even though the growth numbers are slower. I think we go from around the low 200 ,000 back up to 340 ,000 a year migrants is the forecast in the OBR forecast. But I think the most significant thing here is that investment is not strong, exports aren't strong, growth isn't strong, and people's incomes are going to be squeezed. This is not an easy economic environment to do politics. And, you know, it's a continuation of the last 15, 20 years.

15:59But if anything, it's tightening. We'll be back with more on the budget after this.

16:11welcome back so let's get to the um the kind of raw politics of it um although of course what you're saying is going to affect the overall political situation um i mean there's this very very big decision isn't there that um you know ends up um raising 12 billion pounds in tax by the end of the period of freezing the thresholds and it's a you know it's a it's a it's a classic It is the classic stealth tax. It is the, you know, that was how this phrase was first kind of enter bridge politics. It's something people don't really notice. But in effect, because inflation is increasing, because inflation is up, and you don't increase the point at which you pay tax by inflation, it just sucks more and more people both into the income tax system in the first place.

17:06So low-income people suddenly have to pay tax. And secondly, it takes middle-income people into higher bands. And it raises a lot of money. It was used by the last Tory government, by Rishi Sunak, both as Chancellor and then as Prime Minister. On page 30, George, of the OBR document is a table which shows the new taxpayers coming into income tax and existing taxpayers going up to the higher rate or to the additional rate band. And it's basically three to four million pound additional kind of each year rising. I mean, there are three to four million people, people who are now paying the higher rate or the additional rates.

17:47I think I saw that the one in four will be paying a higher rate, not the basic rate. I mean, this is this is a dramatic change in our tax system. system. Yes, and the fact that it's happened, it's essentially a bipartisan move because it's happened under both a Tory and a Labour government now. And the pretense that Labour were going to end it, which Rachel Reeves made a big deal of last year, she said, I'm ending it, it's a tax on working people. She's decided to go ahead. Now, people may not have noticed if there hadn't been all that speculation about putting up the main rates of income tax.

18:26But as I was looking at income tax in this budget. And the odd thing here, I think the odd political judgment, is she's decided to go ahead with this thing, which clearly breaches what she promised she wouldn't do in the last budget. There'll be a row about this, but many people will assume and interpret this as a breach of the manifesto commitment not to raise taxes on working people. Indeed, she herself said in the budget last year, I'm not doing this because this would break our manifesto this year she is doing it although she says it doesn't break the manifesto and that begs the big question of why because you don't need the money to fill the black hole in the public finances because the OBR didn't create that huge black hole and the smaller hole it did create could easily have been filled by some of the other things she did on pension contributions and dividend tax and so on so the big question is why and we you know you alluded to it at the beginning of this live broadcast the first is she's built up her headroom so she's not going to be thrown off course she hopes again next year with changes to the economic forecast forcing her to kind of come back for more money although it's still quite a small headroom in the scale of the you know size of the economy and then she's abolished the two-child limit.

19:47Now, we've had many debates about it on this program. I introduced it. And I think there's a very strong fairness argument that people on benefits should face the same kind of lifestyle choices that everyone else has to face. And when you have more children, that usually costs families more. You have argued strongly that it's not fair and it increased child poverty and it should be abolished. We don't want to rehearse, I think, this afternoon, all those arguments we can come back to them on our regular podcast i think the kind of interesting thing for me to ask you is earlier this year rachel reeves seemed to set her stall against doing this when when when the parliamentary labor party defeated her plans and liz kendall's plans to cut disability benefits what she said to them is right well we're definitely not abolishing the two child limit here we are a few months later and it was the absolute centerpiece rhetorically of the budget, wasn't it?

20:45It was the bit that she laboured through in the sense of wanting to milk it for the purposes of her own backbenches. We know in the polling, it is not popular. It's not popular with all voters. It's not popular with Labour voters. So she wasn't doing it in order to win a big applause in the country. Although I guess she'll hope she can change people's minds about its benefits over time. But it was designed to win a big cheer in the chamber, and it did win the big cheer in the chamber. But it is something she had said only a couple of months ago she wouldn't do. And it's very classic, taxes up on everyone, in order to pay for more benefits for a few.

21:28And it's worth saying in passing, I thought Kemi Bainock had a pretty effective response as leader of the opposition, not an easy thing to do. You know, she's definitely having a good autumn, can we be not? And, you know, I think her kind of central message, which is this is a budget for benefit street paid for by taxes on working people, is a pretty effective conservative line of attack over the coming years. So, my question to you is, why does she do it when she had previously said or indicated she wouldn't do it? Well, I think there are three different explanations you can give. One is just the moral case.

22:09Gordon Brown has been championing this all year, that it is wrong, the children are being disadvantaged in this way, and it should be sorted out. And he makes that moral case for action. And I think in her gut, Rachel Reeves, Keir Starmer will agree with Gordon Brown. And I've made versions of that argument on our podcast. But earlier in the year, Rachel Reeves was saying that there wasn't the money for it and she wasn't going to do it. So that can't be the reason for this change. The second explanation is about political weakness, that the parliamentary Labour Party, the backbench MPs, even though there's a huge majority, are disgruntled and disrupted and are wanting a strategy and to feel that they can believe in the future.

23:01and you just had a deputy leadership election in which Lucy Powell from outside the cabinet and Bridget Phillipson from inside the cabinet both agreed in public the one thing they wanted action on was getting rid of this two-child limit and you know the huge cheers from Labour MPs is because it is what backbench MPs wanted and so the second explanation could be that they're under pressure after the winter fuel allowance and the welfare reform screw-ups and they needed to throw some red meat. I think there's a third explanation, which in a way goes to the conversation which we've started and we'll carry on in our podcast tomorrow, which is the trajectory from here until election day.

23:44Because when Rachel Reeves says she's going to spend more money to reduce child poverty, and this is going to be controversial, not least because you've already had Neil O 'Brien pointing out the large number of people who claim universal credit, who aren't born or don't have citizenship in the UK. And you can imagine how Nigel Farage is going to jump into that debate. Although, interestingly, Nigel Farage has been one of the people advocating getting rid of the two-child limit because he wants people to have more kids. I think he probably has a view about who should have the extra kids. But the counterpart to the reducing child poverty was without doing this, child poverty was going to rise dramatically in the second, third and fourth year of a Labour government, partly because of the way in which you design the policy because more families come into the net of the two child limit as their children grow older.

24:36And so child poverty was going to rise. And you can imagine Rachel Reeves thinking, do I really want to be a Labour Chancellor presiding over not just a squeeze on people's incomes, but rising child poverty? And maybe the same voters can say, I'm not sure, I think it's a good idea, can say, but if Labour's not for reducing child poverty, what's it for? So it may be that they thought that if they're going to act, now is the time to do it. If it was me, I think I would have been more cautious. And I think you could have raised the limit from two to three. I've advocated that before, but they went the whole hog.

25:12And is that because that was what they needed to get child poverty coming down? Was that what they needed politically? Or did Rachel Reeves just decide that she wanted to do this morally? I can't give you the answer. I'm not inside her head, but it's certainly some combination of those arguments. I think the other interesting thing, you know, we often say on our podcast that politics is about choices and we try and bring those to life for people. So there's one choice here is which she could easily have delivered this budget. And avoided having to freeze income tax thresholds and met her fiscal rules.

25:43So she has chosen to increase income tax. It's not been really forced on her by the economic and fiscal circumstances, which is what people were thinking a few weeks ago would be the case. The other choice is she's used this, you know, the money that was therefore available to do this measure that is really directed at the Labour Party members of Parliament. I'd say not really Labour Party voters, according to the opinion polls. And she didn't use a huge amount of money to address kind of cost of living. There was lots of speculation she might get rid of VAT on domestic fuel, for example. That would have been a much more sort of populist, aimed directly at voters measure.

26:26Now, there were some things in this space of which the most kind of notable is getting rid of something called the energy company obligation, which is really kind of boring and technical. But basically was a requirement on energy companies funded by people's electricity bills, by a charge on people's electricity bills and gas bills. to, you know, insulate people's homes and make homes more energy efficient. And I just wanted to, you know, observe this other feature of the budget, which I think is quite interesting. It's quite, it's what David Cameron would have said in private, although it got reported in public at the time.

27:06It's time to ditch the green crap. That's what David was reported as saying. I mean, she has got rid of a central green measure in our energy system. Although the government, I think, is still paying for it, aren't they? They are paying for bits of it. But she's also introduced a new charge on electric vehicles, a per mile charge on electric vehicles. I would say, by the way, if there's anything likely to run into serious parliamentary trouble with the parliamentary labor body, it might be the electric vehicle road user charging, which is also, I would say, a treasury Trojan horse into road user charging, which we've never had in Britain.

27:49And we've had fuel duty, but as more and more people switch to electric cars, they're introducing a brand new tax on how much you drive, which has never existed before. And she froze fuel duty, which was a really expensive thing for her to do, and all the previous chancellors for years and years, starting with Gordon Brown, have done that. But if you took a step back, it's quite a kind of anti-green. You know, it's very, very different from the Ed Miller band. Green deal, you know, the transformation of the economy is part of our industrial strategy. You know, and you've ended up with a series of quite sort of anti-green measures.

28:30Although I think they can all be justified individually. I'm talking about the overall impression. And I also thought it was probably the first time a chancellor in the entire history of the budget has ever talked about the Green Party in a budget speech, you know, that which is a feature of the fact that they are now much more prominent than they have ever been before. Am I over-interpreting all of this? I thought it felt like quite a switch from the Labour Party of 2023-24, the Green Deal, this as being a centrepiece of industrial policy, to let's get rid of some of these green charges and tax people who do green things.

29:13I mean, I think you are right to highlight it, although it's slightly counter to where we started. The Times leader said this was going to be a Labour budget for Labour MPs. And you pointed out that on the two child limit being abolished, that is where the cheers came from. But I'm not sure how many cheers should have been getting for backing off those green measures. definitely from some Labour MPs who are worrying about it, but there'll be lots of other Labour MPs quite worried about Zach Bolanski and what the Greens are up to in their own constituencies who will be concerned about that. There'll be lots of people also wondering whether or not the growth agenda is really going to deliver and that income squeeze.

29:56I think, though, the thing which... Maybe we should end here because we're going to come back to what is tomorrow, but the point you made earlier, just about income tax and the freezing of the thresholds. Don't forget, last year's budget for the final year of this parliament, for 29.30, the furthest the government can go in electoral terms. Last year, Rachel Reeves raised£39 billion in tax in that year, and this budget adds another£23 billion. So there's going to be a£62 billion tax rise happening at the end of the parliament, which is potentially a parliament in which incomes haven't risen a great deal.

30:36there is a margin in the fiscal rules and she's hoping that will be a war chest which she can draw down upon to to mitigate some of those tax rises but is that going to be possible and then as you said in last year's budget she said it wasn't going to freeze income tax allowances because they hit working people we had a press conference in Downing Street a few weeks ago in which she said she was going to level with people about the scale of the challenge everybody had to make their contribution the the very clear view was they were going to be open and straight with people that to tackle the big issues facing britain given the global challenges we couldn't stick with a manifesto and now we've had a budget which has done this year um in the billions of pounds what last year the chance that you wouldn't do because it would hurt working people and rather than sort of saying it's what we need to do because everybody makes a contribution it looks like they're going to maintain the line that actually you know it's kind of consistent with a manifesto really I mean it's not really an income tax rise and I think there'll be lots of Labour and Peace will be thinking you know is that actually a sustainable and winnable argument now given the last three or four weeks I think it's much harder to go and tell it do a television interview and say you know we've kept our manifesto there isn't a problem because people think well i know but you haven't and you've done what you said you wouldn't do and you told us all you were going to be open with us and have you really been and the only way out of this is for this economy to grow more strongly in the next two three years that eases the fiscal pressure it eases the tax pressure these is the living standards uh pressure and um and this was not a budget which gave you confidence that either the treasury or the obr think there is you know a rising feel-good growth factor going to come through the next two or three years.

32:29And so, you know, when the reality sinks in, this is actually a tough political ask for Labour and peace to swallow, I'd say. I mean, no one wants to be compared to the Duke of York these days, but it is reminiscent of the nursery rhyme, isn't it? The Grand Old Duke of York. I think she marched people up the hill of saying there's a hole in the finances. I'm going to stick to my fiscal rules. I'm going to put up income tax. Everyone's going to have to pay. And then when the whole didn't materialize, she didn't want to take everyone right down the bottom of the hill. So she went ahead with the freeze on income tax thresholds.

33:05That's a tax on working people. It's, you know, in all senses, that most people would understand the Labour manifesto, a breach of that manifesto commitment. And then she uses the money for benefits. And, you know, something that's not very popular in the country, whatever one thinks of the kind of fairness argument. And that's, That's quite a big political choice, because if you try and anticipate where the election is going to be for in a few years time, the poor performance of the economy and the rising benefits bill are going to feature very heavily. And I thought just two things to sort of end with as observations.

33:40Next to nothing on the NHS. So surprising. You know, Labour chancellors in the past, you know, would always major on the NHS. And she did say in that Downing Street speech a few weeks ago that the NHS was one of her three priorities. is mentioned only in passing today. And then there's something in the OBR report, which you could have read before she stood up as a result of their mistake. And it says the tax take is going to reach an all-time high in our history. I'm paraphrasing here, but it's an all-time high of 38 % of GDP by 2030. So you'll be going into the general election with taxes at a record high.

34:14But I guess a kind of progressive Labour government that had got its act together would be out there defending that or as I feel what you can say about this performance this budget as I say I thought she was spirited and I guess she lives to fight another day but is that enough well she's through today um and I think her team will think that um despite the ABR leak she's had a good day but a good day after what has been you know a torrid um few weeks um few months which um uh and some massive political challenges to come and we'll kind of dig in more into the um how this parliament now uh unfolds when we do the main podcast tomorrow we've had some questions coming in while we've been talking which we intended to do but you know we have emqs and um we'll have a special budget emqs uh this week to make sure we answer um people's uh questions but it's not too late so if you can send your questions into questions that click our currency co.uk on the budget then we will get to do those on friday if you're gold or kitchen covenant member or monday for everybody else but i think that's probably it for this special live episode of uh we're not going to answer the question hold on before you finish what about this question i'm sure ed will agree with me when i see i'm sure ed will agree with me when i say we need george back as chancellor what she did rather go out of her way to say that there was no return austerity and I think that's because because because Rachel Reaves definitely does not think that she's a return to George to George Osborne unlike the good questions we have from James and Hugo we will try and respond to these this that question was anonymous so unfortunately it might have come from a sort of AI generated bot or something but if I had to guess I'd say Mac Hancock that's that's what I'm guessing thank you very much for joining us today in this live broadcast on YouTube, but you can also, many of you will be listening to it as well as a podcast that's popped into your podcast feed.

36:17Thank you. And we'll see you for our regular episode tomorrow when we will, you know, day two of the budget, George. As you know from Omni Shambles year, that is when it really starts to unravel. That's when Marie Antoinette turned up outside the Treasury and started handing out pasties to the officials. That's when David Cameron thought he'd had a pasty on Leeds Station and it turned out the pasty shop had shut some years ago. We will see you for our normal podcast um uh and thanks for joining us this afternoon