The Budget will backfire: Two ex-chancellors slam Labour’s plans

0:04The Telegraph.

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0:45But something wasn't right. We kind of started to scrutinize things a lot more. What exactly is going on here? Debbie was missing. We just looked at each other and said, so what's the next step? And it's like, police. He was a lovely little boy, but something happened to him to turn him into a monster. There's nothing off her, he just erased her. Missing Debbie, a new Bed of Lies podcast from The Telegraph. Out now. We all know that Labour's budget next week is going to be a nightmare. The country has run out of money. Taxes are probably going to go up. Two former chancellors, Jeremy Hunt and Norman Lamont, join us to give us their two pennies worth on how to balance the country's books.

1:27Every taxi driver knows the name of a chancellor because those decisions are affecting every mortgage, every pension, every holiday, every payslip. They're affecting so much that everyone really, really cares.

1:50Tim, at budget time, former chancellors are like buses. You wait for one to come along and two come along at once. They're considerably more expensive, am I going to say? There's a£2 cap on the buses, whereas chancellors can cost you a lot of money. How much tax have we paid as a result of these two people? That's a very good question. Lord Lamont and Jeremy Hunt joins us in the studio. Lovely to see you both, chaps. Good morning, Lamont. Good morning. Now, also, Tim, have you ever appeared by proxy in a budget speech? No. I have. How? Haven't I, Jeremy Hunt? You have, yes. Yes, I actually quoted Camilla, who gave me the most fantastic saying by the road haulier, Eddie Stobart, whose lorries you see going trundling up and down the motorways, who said, the only place success comes before work is the dictionary.

2:38Oh, very clever. What a phrase. It appeared in my budget speech, thanks to Camilla. This is the equation I give to my children. Hard plus work equals success. And I think you and I are testament to that. We are. We've got you both here because we have a budget being delivered next Wednesday. First question before we get on to what's the state of the economy, what should he do, what are the alternatives? Jeremy, did you, as was your right, ever drink when delivering the budget? Ah, the most important question of all. Yes. Because you're allowed to have an alcoholic drink if you're delivering a budget.

3:11And no one has since Ken Clarke. And I was absolutely determined to break the Omerta. And actually, I had lined up a bottle of Welsh whiskey, Penderyn, because I have some Welsh blood. And I actually had the bottle and I was ready to drink it. And then my special advisors did what special advisors do and said, this might not be a good move because you are putting up duty on scotch. and so we had a lot of to-ing and fro-ing but in the end I allow myself to be persuaded not to. And Norman, did you drink? I did. I drank an Orkney whiskey. Very good. It was a rather sensitive point though because William Hague, who was my PPS, when he was later, years later, on the after-dinner speaking circuit, he used to tell a story that I'd held up the budget box outside number 11 and inside was a bottle of whiskey.

4:07Well, if you know where the budget box is actually, in my day, was the original one that Gladstone had. And it was this thick. So the idea of a bottle of whiskey could go into it. Maybe a hip flask. Or a miniature could have got in. But William thought this was essential to his after-dinner performance to tell this completely untrue story. Might it be useful from both of your perspectives to talk about the legacy you inherited compared with what John Healy is inheriting and needs to deal with next week? Jeremy, first of all, because you were in the post-pandemic period. So it wasn't exactly a glittering era, was it, for Britain's finances?

4:47No, there is a big similarity and a big difference. I mean, first of all, the difference. I arrived as Chancellor in the middle of a firestorm. We had markets tumbling, inflation at 11%, the Bank of England predicting we were going to go into the longest recession for 100 years, huge black hole in the public finances. And John Healy doesn't have that. On the other hand, we both face the fundamental change in economic circumstances that has happened since 2022, when the era of low interest rates, near zero interest rates, ended with the invasion of Ukraine. and therefore there is this£110 billion debt interest bill, just under£4 ,000 per household in the UK, that we now have to pay in tax just to pay the interest on our national mortgage.

5:42And that has really made even relatively normal budgets much, much harder going. And I have that, Rachel Reeves had that, and now John Healy has got that too. Norman, I mean, you had to deal with Black Wednesday. I mean, where are we now? But that was years later or several years later. No, the inheritance I had was one where inflation was actually 11 % and we were very keen to get it down. And that was the overwhelming concern. But we were also just at the point where we were about to go in recession and we weren't sure whether we would or wouldn't go in, but we did go into recession. And so my whole time as Chancellor was dominated by the fact we were in recession.

6:26And we were anxious, obviously, to get out of it as quickly and as sustainably as possible. Yes, that must have been difficult to come after the so-called boom era of the Thatcher years. I mean, it's just interesting because it's back in the lexicon now because we've got a prime minister who seems to want to go back to the 1970s. And those who oppose him say, well, it would probably be better to go back to the 1980s. But the 80s ended with double-digit inflation and unemployment. That is true. And of course, it's one of the points to remember when the economy is booming. Most recessions are actually caused by booms getting out of hand.

7:03Arguably, that was what happened at the end of the 80s. Is it wrong for the right to be harking back to Thatcher in the face of the left harking back to the 70s? Well, I think it's wrong to, as Jeremy just pointed out, it's wrong to refer to the 70s as a golden period. The 70s were, goodness knows, an absolute disaster. I think the 80s were a period of economic success and of reform and of change, change brought about by the government. But I think it's wrong for people constantly to think the next person who's going to lead the Conservative Party to victory must be another version of Mrs. Thatcher.

7:44Life isn't like that. Another Thatcher doesn't just come along. I'm not saying Kimmy Baden-Owock doesn't have good qualities. But for her constantly to be portrayed as another Mrs. Thatcher, I think is misleading wrong. And I don't think we should look for another Mrs. Thatcher. But you might look for nearly 3 % in growth every year that she was in charge. No, no, no. I'm just making a point about the character of the person. But to pick up on that character point, I think some of what people are talking about when they say we need a Maggie is they're not just talking, Jeremy, about the specifics of the policy, but also a character who, OK, adjusts according to circumstance.

8:21You don't want a complete dogmatic in there. But someone who, when they says, this is the direction I'm setting for the economy, they don't U-turn on that dramatically. So to put this in practical terms, it would be nice to have a Tory who says, I will cut tax, and they will actually cut tax, rather than what happened in the late stages of the last Tory government, where Conservatives raised taxes. Well, let me, as you've got two chancellors here. As did Norman. You raised taxes too. Absolutely and rightly. Let me, as we've got two chances here, let me actually talk about the real Thatcherite equality that I do think we need today, by the way, which I think Kemi has.

9:00And that is to say, I'm going to put in place policies that will bear fruit in the longer term, but may be painful or may take time to actually come to fruition. And when I was writing my new book this summer, Can We Be Rich Again, which Norman actually helped me with, he drew my attention to really the heart of that, which is what is called supply-side reforms, reforms that actually improve the productive capacity of the economy. Now, bringing tax down is one way of doing that, but you do have to balance the book. You can't do that by borrowing more. But also, you could bring down energy prices by increasing capacity of the national grid, drilling in the North Sea.

9:46That would have a tremendous impact on the long-term productive potential of the economy. You could reform welfare. Again, Again, not an easy thing to do politically, but something that would have big long-term impact. And I think the worry that I have from the noises that we're getting from Downing Street at the moment is that they are looking for a steady-as-she-goes budget. When for the few weeks in the run-up to a budget, in some ways the Chancellor is the most powerful person in the country. Because you're in charge of the most powerful department. You have huge levers over every other government department.

10:21but also the prime minister needs his budget to be a success and so you actually have the support of number 10 which is why both Andy Burnham and John Healy slapped down Yvette Cooper when she wrote in asking for more money in the budget because you know the prime minister's with you so you have a period where you can do bold things and it's a real waste no other cabinet minister has it there's not a sort of health moment for Yvette Cooper to set out a state of the nation on the future of the NHS or an annual transport moment or whatever, the chance is the only one that has that moment. And I think just to say, we just want to keep things calm.

11:00Of course, you want the bond markets to stay calm, not knocking that at all. But to waste the opportunity to quarrel the whole of Whitehall to do radical supply side reforms, I think would be a shame. Picking up on that, I know that when Ronald Reagan entered office in 1981, his people reached out to Thatcher's team and said, what is your advice? And they said, the thing we learned is, do what you're going to do as soon as possible. Get it out of the way. Do it. Don't drag. Because all you'll do is lose political capital and you won't have laid the groundwork, as you say, for those long-term structural reforms.

11:42you'll just have to do it later. And people will still hate you for it. And in fact, because you've allowed so much time to pass, you might find it harder to do. And so the Reaganites took that on board and went straight ahead with their tax cuts. With Healy, I'm struck by what wasn't in his conference speech, Norman, and what he hasn't talked about. And he hasn't talked about those reforms. He didn't really have any policies in that speech. And I have no sense with this budget that's coming forward that he's going to do dramatic things that are going to put us on a different path. I don't know what to expect because the man just seems to be a blank slate.

12:18Well, I don't know either, but I think John Healy is probably wanting to postpone a lot of decisions. That is my impression. It's been remarkable how few leaks there have been. I mean, one of the great mistakes that I think happened during Rachel Reeve's chancellorship was the amount of speculation, the amount of leaks, people floating this idea of them withdrawing it, which was enormously damaging to confidence and just led to people reacting to this, reacting to that. And it created a huge amount of uncertainty. I think John Healy has, to his credit, managed to stop that. But I suspect that he's also wanting postponed decisions.

12:59There are an awful lot of things looming for the second half of this government. When we talk about, Rachel Reeves used to talk about a black hole. There are several black holes that John Healy is raising, potholes all over the place. And I think he's wanting to postpone the decisions. We're now hearing possibly that the expenditure round may be postponed from the autumn of this year to the spring of next year. That is going to be the moment when truth hits the government, that they've actually got plans. If we look at their expenditure plans to the end of the parliament, the difficult decisions there, taking up your point about Ronald Reagan, are in the last years.

13:38Because the increase in expenditure is very, very tight, unrealistically tight, which means they will either have to cut spending or put up taxes. And that, I think, is something that, you know, they really don't want to face up to. But they're going to have to face up to it when the expenditure round happens. But there are some red lines that John Healy simply cannot cross if they're to honour the Labour manifesto, Jeremy. So that is to not put up income tax, to not put up VAT, to not put up national insurance. notwithstanding that people think that they breached that when they put up employers national insurance therefore if taxes are to go up they're to go up by stealth so that's why we're seeing for instance today on the front page of the telegraph this idea that maybe businesses being inherited might be subject to a much much higher tax than at present i think that tax is currently around 28 it could go up to 44 it's going to be little schemes like that and actually by the way can you hide these things in plain sight?

14:37Yes well I think it was Einstein said the definition of insanity is to do the same thing twice and expect a different result and they've already clobbered family businesses with the removal of inheritance tax relief an absolutely crazy policy to stop families passing on their businesses to future generations to force them to sell up and I would be astonished but perhaps not totally astonished given some of the mistakes we've had if they were to go down that route again. But you're absolutely right, Camilla. And this is the central problem, that the taxes that are left, the taxes that are not covered by those manifesto commitments, are actually the biggest growth killers of all, because they're business taxes.

15:21And we know that growth, you know, at its most fundamental, growth depends on investment. And if you hike taxes on the private sector, which is 80 % of our national output, then they will have less money to invest in growing and expanding and that will be the consequence now i'm worried that what seems to be nailed on from this budget according to the speculation is a bank tax and i resisted that now i i get the politics bankers are never popular particularly after the financial crisis in fact they behave quite outrageously i think in that period paying themselves enormous bonuses straight after they've been bailed out by taxpayers but But the reality is that capital is mobile.

16:04And if you hike taxes on banks and financial services organizations, they will move and we will find that we end up getting less revenue, not more revenue. So I think we've got to be really careful. you know rule number one maybe we're not as as tim says and i fear we're not going to get that radical bold reforming budget we want but if you're not going to do that at least do no harm and i think uh this area of business taxes is fraught with danger growth isn't as bad one point please do no i i think um you're you're right in your suggestion that what he will do is look for a lot of minor taxes to increase.

16:44I mean, we might get something on betting, I would think. We might get an online sales tax. Although that would be highly, highly complex. But I think they will have a lot of minor measures to make the sums add up, avoiding the big issues. I entirely agree with Jeremy about banks. It's very popular, of course, to hit banks. but British banks already taxed more than foreign competitors. British banks also, we used to be one of the dominant countries in Europe with our banking system. Not today. Our banks are very small compared with those in the United States, for example. They've had more deregulation, different capital requirements.

17:28They dominate the market. And I think introducing an extra tank on British banks is just actually to shoot ourselves in the foot. And we ought to be proud of the fact that financial services is a major industry in this country, employing a million people, a large part of our exports as well. And simply to tax it because people won't object in, I think is very short-sighted and very damaging indeed. Banks are what provide the capital for growth. I mean, if you're wanting growth, why attack the people who supply the means by which growth happens. Sure. I mean, it will play very well with the Labour-backed benches, won't it?

18:05It will play very well with people who like to see the whole of British history bathed in the glow of a miner's lamp. It was interesting. Well, that's the point, though, isn't it? It's all very, you know, these two men in Healy's speech and in Burnham's speech seem to want to get back to this sort of nirvana where factories of the north are, you know, pumping out manufacturing and they're obviously living, they've sort of forgotten that the country has changed a great deal in the last 40 years. They don't want to celebrate bankers because it plays very well with their support base. I mean, look at what's been going on in France and around the country.

18:40You know, there's no sympathy with bankers. So if they're going to come up with a thoroughly socialist offering, there's going to be cheers for extra government spending that we don't have. But there's a problem with that. There's always a problem with socialism, isn't there? And I actually reduced the bank's surcharge on corporation tax by 3 % because the main corporation tax rate was going up. and the reason I did it, I wanted to offset that effect, was because I looked at the numbers and financial services actually responsible about 11 % of our tax revenues, about half the cost of running the NHS.

19:12Yes. And you want that to keep growing. It really matters. Even if you're a socialist, even if you're Jeremy Corbyn, you want that money coming in and the thing that worries me about the sort of Burnham-Healy team in Downing Street compared to the Blair-Brown team. I mean, in that era, we had lots of criticisms of Blair and Brown, but they had a plan to generate the cash they wanted for public services. And in a nutshell, it was don't touch the thatch-right economic inheritance and keep backing the city. And Gordon Brown was very explicit about that because he wanted to churn out money for his initiatives to cut child poverty, put into the NHS and so on.

19:56with the current occupants of Downing Street, I've heard nothing about their plans to try and generate the wealth. I had lots about what they want to spend money on, but nothing about how they're planning to generate it. Which is weird, because Burnham's very happy with all of the wealth that has been poured into his beloved Manchester. I mean, in that sense, capitalism is good. Yes, yes. Well, it seems to be working all right at the moment because the growth rate is 0.7 % in the three months to August and we're the fastest growing in the G7. So have the Tories' warnings of doom actually been proved wrong?

20:29Well, it's a modest growth rate, but I agree it's a bit of an improvement. The interesting thing is, will it be the same in the second half of the year? We've had several years in which the first half of the year has seen faster growth, followed by a slowdown in the second. Can I make one point about what I think may happen longer term? last year rachel reeves altered the definition of debt so that debt can include can be diminished by treating financial assets in a different way that is to say if the government invest in the steel industry via borrowing that doesn't count as debt it counts as an asset because the asset is there the ownership of the steel industry they could use this i think with things like the business bank the wealth fund in order to get what they call investment into certain areas of the economy, and it wouldn't count against debt.

21:24I think they'd have to be very careful about this, because markets are not fools, and they can see what's happening. But it is possible that the government may conclude, provided we have more borrowing done through things like the business bank or the wealth fund, that that will not scare the markets, and we can have another source of money to use for industrial policy or economic policy. I think that's something they may do in the later years.

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23:54When you see the debt and deficit figures, did they blow your mind in comparison to what you were dealing with back in the day? Yes, they are worrying. Of course, what is particularly worrying, as everybody has been commenting on, is the rate of interest that we have to pay on our long-term debt, 10 years and above. And, you know, that is very alarming when we've had a period of relatively low interest rates, relatively low if you're looking at it since the Second World War. And the real danger for the economy is that we get into what people call this doom loop. By the doom loop, they mean interest payments, which are already over 100 billion a year, go up further and further and further and become unaffordable.

24:39That's when you might have a real problem. Of course, this is a problem not just for Britain, but for a lot of countries. I mean, France is in a very similar but worse situation. The Americans, God bless the Americans, of course, don't bother to observe much constraint on their deficit at all and don't seem to be. But even the dollar could ultimately be affected by this situation. Although didn't Reagan once famously say the deficit is big enough to look after itself? I don't know if he was joking or not. No, I don't think he was joking really. Because Americans take a different view towards deficits because of the privileged position of the dollar and the US economy.

25:15And that people will always want to hold the debt of the United States. Dick Cheney once said bluntly, deficits don't matter. Well, that may be an American point of view. may be viable for America, but it's not viable for us. Jeremy, did you worry about the deficit and debt, be honest? Yes, I did. You can't not worry about it when I came straight after the mini budget, where a failure to think about the pressure on borrowing set the markets off. But I think what I did and what Rachel Reeves is doing and what John Healy is doing is essentially try to make sure that in any fiscal package I announced, it didn't create a similar trigger.

26:04And that is not the same as having a long term plan to bring down debt as a proportion of GDP. and it was only after I stopped being chancellor and I started to think about this and I started to think what is the plan we should have because I think it is we're in a world now where increasingly young people are losing hope and one of the reasons is because they're worried about AI devouring their jobs for breakfast but one of the reasons is they're worried about debt both their own student debt and also the national debt and I think we should have a new rule a fiscal rule, if you like, that outside emergencies, governments will never increase public spending by faster than the growth rate of the economy.

26:49Because the root cause of the problem has been that over many years now, since the financial crisis, on average, our public spending has been increasing by faster than economic growth. And over time, that would be a discipline on public spending that would see it start to fall as a proportion of GDP. But on that, that's also because of the optics of public spending. So if the Tories want to cut government spending, it's called austerity. If the left want to do it, it's called efficiency. This is the trouble that you're often hoist by your own petard. Even you must have both known as chancellors that you were never going to be popular with the right if you didn't cut taxes in the same way that any left-wing chancellor is never going to be popular with the left unless they increase government spending.

27:33I can give you a perfect example of that, Camilla, which is that when Rachel Reeves announced her spending plans, both for capital and spending, I compared them to the amounts that Rishi Sunak had announced when he became chancellor in 2020. and Rachel Rees had actually cut both capital spending and day-to-day spending from the levels that the previous Conservative government had planned at the beginning of the previous Parliament. And yet no one talked about it as austerity or cuts or anything like that. Well, they wouldn't, would they? Because it's not being officiated by a Tory. Yes. But we should never have used the word ourselves.

28:13I mean, I think it was Conservatives who later said an end to austerity has happened. We should never have said that. The word austerity should have been disputed from the very beginning. What George Osborne did was not really austerity. It was common sense. As Jeremy has said, the basic rule ought to be that public expenditure doesn't increase faster than the economy. I don't think you could have an actual rule or a piece of legislation that said that, because, for example, if the economy was in a recession, you wouldn't want public expenditure to have to go down by the same amount. In fact, you might want to, for other reasons, maintain it.

28:47But I think in terms of the long term, it is right. Public expenditure must grow more slowly than the economy. Otherwise, it's unaffordable. And, you know, this whole question of expenditure versus tax cuts, Mrs. Thatcher, to go back to her, where we were earlier, she always took the view that the deficit came first before anything else. And the first thing Mrs. Thatcher did in the 80 and 81 budgets with Geoffrey Howe was to put up taxes. They put them up to get the deficit down. People often forget that. VAT went up very considerably. Yes. The view was a deficit is only taxation deferred. But at the same time, sorry, she wanted to shift away from taxes on income and towards taxes upon spending.

29:37The point and the important point being, it wasn't just that she raised taxes in order that the deficit wouldn't be such an issue. she at the same time had a long-term structural vision for how the economy would perform better after those taxes. She wanted to cut taxes long term and that was going to be her ambition. But she and Geoffrey put up taxes in order to get the deficit down. I mean financial stability and fiscal discipline have to come first before anything else. And I think what Rachel Reeves was trying to do, but she completely failed to do, was actually to, you know, we've had this increased deficit since COVID.

30:17Under Jeremy, it was coming down. Rachel Reeves wanted to continue the process of it coming down, but actually she failed to get it down fast enough. She ought to have done better. And she failed because of all the expenditure that they decided to have and the pay awards they decided to give. And so it came down more slowly than it should have done. And more slowly than it would have done had Jeremy continued in office. You can look at the conservative government's plans for the reduction of the deficit in the period that Rachel Reeves was chancellor. And actually, she did not come down as fast as the conservatives were planning to bring it.

30:53But that is the important point, that fiscal discipline must come down first. There's another point that needs to be made. Jeremy is talking about our fiscal rules, and the government are trying to reassure the markets by saying, we'll stick to our fiscal rules. The fiscal rules are pretty meaningless because what they actually allow, as long as you say in the last and second last year of the survey or of the period to which the fiscal rules apply, as long as the debt is coming down in that last year, then we can say we're in accordance with the fiscal rules. We can write in fantasy figures for the last year.

31:31We need tougher fiscal rules. Jeremy. Can I just mention, before we close, the elephant in the room? Because I think as Chancellor, you do have a responsibility to look above the parapet beyond your own departmental considerations to what is happening in the world. And it is impossible to look at global events now and say we shouldn't be increasing funding on defence. And in fact, It's a dereliction of duty that John Healy knows only too well from his previous role as Secretary of State for Defence, which he resigned from because he said that he felt so strongly about that. Now, in this situation, I just make two observations.

32:12If you don't want to kill off long term growth, the only way to do that is to tackle welfare reform. and the government's trying to make the right noises in this area, but it's going much too slowly. And we could see a Russian incursion into, I don't know, somewhere like Estonia, really very soon. And we are going to look complete idiots if we have not got ahead of the curve because when you increase defence spending, It takes several years before that actually translates into additional military capacity. So you need to have the welfare reform to fund the defense capacity. And here's the real upside, the supply side element to that.

32:57The original Silicon Valley in America got going because of investment by NASA and the Department of Defense in startups in the campus of Stanford University. And that was the start of Silicon Valley. We have a good, really quite impressive tech sector in this country. If we increase defence spending in a smart way, don't just give it to the big defence contractors, but actually made sure some of that investment went to the really exciting spin-outs and start-ups coming from our universities with dual civilian military use. There's a big opportunity for the UK going forward. And so that would be, for me, an example of a real win-win, because you could do things that would help long-term growth.

33:41and secure the defence of the country. I thought you were going to say AI, by the way, when you said there's one thing in the room that no one's talking about and it's striking that the conferences didn't really touch upon. There's an overlap, of course. Absolutely, but that's the biggest economic change that's coming down the pipe. Well, it was very interesting that in the growth figures for the last quarter that you referred to as being quite good, that actually that was caused by an AI boost to the economy, largely for smaller businesses too. Productivity. Also, we're going to have to drill baby drill for that.

34:11I mean, the amount of energy required to propel AI and make us a leader in AI is, you know, beyond Ed Miliband's worst nightmares, frankly. I have a final question I really want to ask. To me, it's the thing that most interests me about politics, which is the acting. And Chancellor seems to me the toughest job in government because people are looking at the Chancellor all the time and trying to infer not just from what they say or they don't say, but their body language. What's that? What the real state of the economy is. Did you find, Norman, that as Chancellor you had to put on a particular act?

34:44Did you have to become Chancellor-like? I had to control my eyebrows. What does that mean? Not to look too surprised. Right. Yes, when you're looking through the figures. Oh, no! But were you conscious of that extraordinary? It must have been extraordinary, the pressure on you all the time of people trying to figure out always what it is, what's going on, what you might do. Well, of course, one was helped then by a tighter degree of purdah. I mean, we've had a sort of purdah before this budget. Healy seems wisely to have decided that. The nightmare was always you would read these stories in newspapers, some of which were accurate, some of which were inaccurate.

35:23But you could never tell which came from leaks and which came from very clever journalists making intelligent guesses. Right. Jeremy? Well, I think you cannot underestimate the personal pressure that a chancellor is on ahead of a budget and more than any ahead of their first budget, as it is for John Healy now. And, you know, sometimes chancellors are caricatured as slightly vanilla figures, the kind of the nation's finance director. But the truth is every taxi driver knows the name of the chancellor because those decisions are affecting every mortgage, every pension, every holiday, every payslip.

36:02They're affecting so much that everyone really, really cares. And I remember ahead of my autumn statement of 2022, which was a particularly brutal statement where taxes went up. I cut spending and I had a huge salvage job to do, really. I got a suitcase in the post from a church school in my constituency and I opened it up and every single child had written a prayer for me ahead of the autumn statement. That's nice. Absolutely incredible. I was very touched. But, you know, that I think is an indication that it is, I think, the biggest parliamentary occasion of the year. You can think of sort of the state openings of parliament and, you know, tub stopping speeches by prime ministers at various moments.

36:52But the budget is a moment. And one of the issues with a budget is which actually Norman didn't have to deal with. But within hours of sitting down, the OBR stand up. Yes. And give an independent verdict on what you said. And because there are fiscal rules, there are always losers. And you know the OPR will point out exactly who those losers are. Norman, do you think Liz Truss was undone by the Bank of England? Do you buy into that conspiracy theory? I think the main thing that undid the budget was the expenditure package. It wasn't so much the taxes. It was the energy package. That was unbelievable and bound to alarm the markets.

37:32Right. OK. On that note. That's what I'd ask. I'm always curious to know What was it that blew up Liz Truss? What was it that undid Liz Truss? Well, yeah, you know, the sheer cost of that energy was completely unaffordable. Not the tax cuts then? It wasn't so much the tax cuts. The bailout. Ironically, that's the thing that really undid the mini budget, not the tax cuts. Right, well, we'll go off now and pray for John Healy. And, of course, we'll be covering the budget next week, Wednesday, October the 28th. Thank you very much to Lord Lamont and Jeremy Hunt. Lovely to see you. Thank you, Mkirl.

38:07Thank you very much. Thank you.

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