Rob Paston

speaker

163 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 31 May

Rob Paston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Rest Is Money · 283. Does the UK need to be rich? · 31 May 2026 podcast

Just the final sort of big question before we drill down into individual policies.

There's a lot of talk at the moment that the country is ungovernable, right?

It's become a big debate given the crisis that this government is going through, essentially whether the prime minister can survive.

Is there just a fundamental problem that any genuine restructuring that has to be done –

It has two qualities.

One is it's going to divide MPs and possibly to such an extent that you're not going to get it through Parliament.

And second, that almost everything you need to do, you can't do within one Parliament.

And therefore the electoral cycle just makes it almost impossible to fix the country in the way that you would want.

And I'm reminded, I guess...

Perhaps the biggest thing that you did, which is you did two National Insurance Cuts at a cost of 20 billion.

I would argue that if you had done those as a way of basically reorienting the costs of employing people, cutting those costs, but then raising money elsewhere, possibly through a change in asset taxation of some sort, that would have been a really radical reform for a chancellor to make.

But actually, it was just an electoral bribe.

And, you know, you talk a lot about getting debt under control.

And it's obviously important to get under control.

But those two cuts did the opposite of that.

But, you know, my answer to... Yeah, but you cut the headroom to the bare minimum.

Paul would agree that the second one was totally unaffordable.

I've asked him about it.

My argument is not that you shouldn't be...

And cutting taxes, particularly taxes which relate to essentially the ability of businesses to grow and employ people.

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