Simon Harris

What I'm saying is we're taking the time to follow the evidence and to work our way through this step by step because anybody trying to predict, you know, they used to say a week is a long time in politics.

I mean, by the time I come out of this studio, God knows what could have happened to the world, right?

So we've got to take this step by step.

We have...

We have economic strength here.

How we deploy it matters.

You only miss it when it's gone, right?

How we deploy it matters.

We've put in place one of the largest packages in the European Union to help.

That's not going to be the final word.

We have an ability to help further, but we can't do it every day.

Sorry, goodbye.

I fundamentally disagree with that because you or I or nobody could predict, perhaps even President Trump couldn't have predicted when we delivered Budget 2026 in October 2025 that he was going to bomb Iran.

So let me directly come back to the income tax piece.

But just at the time of Budget 2026, the last budget, we were predicting that inflation was going to be 1.9%, below that 2% figure.

It's now being predicted in the baseline scenario, if you like, to be 3.3%.

So we're in a vastly different economic situation.

We campaigned in an election on the basis that we were going to move away from temporary one-off and try and bring about structural changes in cost spaces that families and business

Well, that's definitely not how I remember the day after the budget.

But I mean, you are right that we didn't have a personal income tax package in the last budget.