Phil Aldrich

Good to be here.

Yeah, I mean, we've got 23 billion of headroom that Rachel Reeves left us with, which itself was a relatively small amount of headroom.

Unless he gets really lucky with growth.

Yeah, he's really got very few options.

At the end of the parliament, most of the hard work is going to be done with these frozen tax thresholds, which are going to really irritate most people.

of the electorate.

So you can't really see the government pushing through that, even a Burnham government pushing through with something which is going to be so unpopular right before a general election.

Well, the only thing I'd caution there is that obviously the situation right now in the middle of the Iran war and the oil price spike, etc., the inflation's picked up.

So a lot of that may just be a temporary spike.

The underlying state of the public finances does remain pretty dire.

It was going to be very difficult for Starmer to deliver the fiscal rules and get growth going and get investment up because there are so many pressures on all sorts of public spending at the moment.

Yeah, I mean, it's implausible to think that he can make all these tax cuts for particular sections of society and to help ease some of the pressures on business without recovering the money from elsewhere.

And we've seen that spending cuts seem to be pretty undeliverable under this government.

And the makeup of the Labour governments or the Labour Party with the backbench rebellions still sort of brewing whenever there is talk of a spending cut.

It's going to be the same problem that Burnham faces in regard to that.

So yes, if there's going to be a tax cut, there's going to be a tax rise to pay for that tax cut.

That's the way, if he is honestly going to stick to the fiscal rules that Rachel Reeves has introduced, then yeah, somebody is going to bear some pain to ease the pain on someone else.

It doesn't make any money.

It never makes any money.

It doesn't touch the sides, does it, really?