Paul Johnson
speaker
21 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2015
last heard May 2015
Paul Johnson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Paddy Ashdown, is it?
It was unusual.
I mean, the parties don't tend to challenge what we say because we do tend to be right.
And in this case, we were right.
And the SNP were just wrong to challenge the numbers.
I mean, actually, to their credit... Had they admitted that?
No.
But to their credit, I mean, they said very clearly what their spending plans were in numeric terms.
It's just that their numeric terms didn't meet their rhetoric.
Well, it was a strange one.
The issue with what the Labour Party was saying is that they were, in a way, I think, being very cleverly but very deliberately vague about actually what they wanted to do in terms of balancing the books.
They said, at some point during the Parliament, we want to get to current budget balance.
That means, current budget balance means you're happy to borrow in order to invest.
And we invest about £25 to £30 billion today.
a year at the moment.
So essentially the only assumption that we could make, because they were being deliberately vague, was that by somewhere around 2019 they would get the deficit down from the £90 billion it was last year to about £30 billion.
I thought there was a great example in the budget, actually, where you have this perfect example of the Chancellor and the Leader of the Opposition talking across each other in exactly the way Will describes.
George Osborne says, we're all £900 a year better off...
Ed Miliband says we're all £1,600 a year worse off.
Now, I can tell you exactly what those numbers mean.
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