06/12/2025
The Week in Westminster
BBC
4.0 • 258 Ratings
🗓️ 6 December 2025
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Daily Telegraph's political editor, Ben Riley-Smith, analyses the latest developments at Westminster.
Following further fallout from Rachel Reeves' Budget, and accusations that she misled the public about the state of the public finances, Ben speaks to two members of the Treasury select committee who have been investigating the issue: Labour MP, Yuan Yang, and Conservative MP, Dame Harriet Baldwin.
After the Prime Minister signalled that the government would make a fresh attempt to reform the welfare system, Ben is joined by the Labour chair of the Work and Pensions select committee, Debbie Abrahams, and the former Conservative Work and Pensions Secretary, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, who introduced Universal Credit.
Former Labour Home Secretary, Jack Straw, and former Conservative Justice Secretary, Alex Chalk, debate the government's proposals to reduce the number of jury trials.
And the state of Anglo-German relations was in focus this week following a state visit by the German President. To discuss this Ben brings together two German-born British politicians: Former Labour MP, Baroness Gisela Stuart, and Wera Hobhouse, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bath.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Ben Riley Smith from The Daily Telegraph with The Week in Westminster. |
| 0:09.6 | It was a grey and grisly Westminster this week, with the government deluged by accusations about |
| 0:15.6 | the budget. They were unusually, not about its contents, but the way Rachel Reeves had framed the package before it was unveiled. |
| 0:24.4 | Had the Chancellor misled the public over the state of the nation's finances, |
| 0:28.3 | giving political cover for big tax increases to fund more welfare spending? |
| 0:32.5 | Absolutely not, say her supporters. |
| 0:35.2 | The contrasting views were put up in lights by Kenny Badenock, |
| 0:38.7 | the Conservative leader, when she took to the dispatch box for Prime Minister's questions. |
| 0:43.6 | We now know the black hole was fake, her book was fake, her CV was fake, even her chest claims |
| 0:49.0 | are made up. She doesn't belong in the Treasury. She belongs in La La Land. |
| 0:55.8 | The Prime Minister hit back. |
| 0:57.4 | Mr. Speaker, the vast majority of families we helped in the budget are in work. |
| 1:01.5 | Three quarters of children in poverty are in working families. |
| 1:09.0 | Their policy of nearly 10 years on the two-child benefit cap, had one result and one result only. It dragged hundreds of thousands of children into poverty. They should be utterly ashamed of that. |
| 1:25.8 | Add in toward this a twist. The chairman of the Office of into all this, a twist. |
| 1:28.1 | The chairman of the Office of Budget Responsibility, Richard Hughes, resigned on Monday. |
| 1:33.4 | He cited the embarrassing early release of budget details, |
| 1:36.8 | but it did follow tensions with the Treasury over the watchdog's forecasts. |
| 1:41.5 | So, where does the truth lie? |
| 1:43.7 | I brought together two members of the Treasury |
| 1:45.8 | Select Committee who had been looking into this issue. Dame Harriet Baldwin, a Conservative MP, |
| 1:51.9 | was the committee's chair until 2024, and Labour's Yuan Yang is a former financial journalist. |
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