Robert Paston

speaker

388 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 10 Jun

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

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Rest Is Money · 282. Are politicians living in a tax-and-spend dream world? · 27 May 2026 podcast

I thought we'd just kick off with the government's plans to reduce the cost of living.

It says its number one priority is to protect particularly those on low incomes from the surge in energy prices that are the result of Trump's war in Iran.

And we've had a number of initiatives, one of them

Yet again, not to increase fuel duty, but also there are other initiatives like subsidising trips to theme parks and free bus travel for kids.

I just wondered in the round, does this look to you like the best way to protect people on low incomes from a cost of living surge?

In a word, no.

And as you say, it is the highest earning households that get the biggest benefit, but by some margin.

Why is it that successive governments find it so difficult to target help in a granular way?

Is it a sort of GDPR privacy issue that makes it very difficult to match up these two buckets of data, HMRC's data and energy companies' data?

Or is there something else going on?

He's specifically talking about the IMF.

He says he has a lot of sympathy with Rachel Reeves because when he was chancellor, the IMF was consistently negative, then revised up.

But by the time they revised up, the negative publicity has already happened to the UK.

And again, it's happened to Reeves.

Exactly the same thing.

And so, you know, Steph's question, just why does the IMF single us out in this way?

Us, all three of us, have been talking about this as effectively as a national emergency for years.

One of the things that tells you all you need to know about the crisis of politics is even though it is a national emergency, arguably the only prime minister of recent times who took it seriously as a national emergency was Liz Truss.

And we saw where that got us.

Why is it that governments find it so difficult

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