29/11/2025
The Week in Westminster
BBC
4.0 • 258 Ratings
🗓️ 29 November 2025
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sonia Sodha takes a look at Chancellor Rachel Reeves' long-awaited Budget with former Treasury Minister and now Shadow Leader of the House, Conservative MP Jesse Norman and Labour MP Jeevun Sandher who until recently served on the Treasury Select Committee.
To discuss proposed peace plans for Ukraine, Sonia is joined by Ivanna Klympush Tsintsadze, who chairs the Ukrainian parliament’s committee on integration with the EU.
Leaked proposals this week suggest the government is considering limiting trial by jury to only the most serious crimes. To discuss this. Sonia is joined by criminal defence barrister Joanna Hardy-Susskind and Danny Shaw, a former BBC correspondent and former adviser to Yvette Cooper.
And, this week, the Education Select Committee launched an inquiry looking into the decline in reading for pleasure by children. To discuss how to keep the joy of reading alive, Sonia is joined by Labour MP Jess Asato, who is on the Committee and children’s author AF Steadman, whose Skandar series has been translated into 46 languages.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.4 | This is Sonia Soda with the Week in Westminster. |
| 0:09.7 | After months of speculation, the big political event of the autumn, Rachel Rees' second budget, finally arrived. |
| 0:16.6 | And it arrived earlier than expected after the OBR's market-sensitive analysis of all her measures |
| 0:23.0 | was discovered online a good 45 minutes before she'd even got up to speak, sending Westminster into a frenzy. |
| 0:31.5 | In the end, the Chancellor didn't have to contend with the big deterioration in the public finances |
| 0:36.4 | many had been expecting, |
| 0:38.3 | but she chose to put up taxes to fund lifting children out of poverty, reducing energy bills |
| 0:44.0 | and building a bigger fiscal buffer. |
| 0:46.5 | I have asked everyone to contribute, yes, for the security of our country and the brightness |
| 0:51.7 | of its future. |
| 0:53.3 | But I have kept that contribution as low as possible by reforming our country and the brightness of its future. But I have kept that contribution as low as possible |
| 0:56.8 | by reforming our tax system, making it fairer and stronger for the future. |
| 1:03.2 | The leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenok, |
| 1:06.1 | who had a head start on her response thanks to the OBR's mistake, |
| 1:10.2 | didn't see it in quite the same way. |
| 1:12.5 | That smorgasbord of misery we just heard from her can be summed up in one sentence. Labor are |
| 1:18.0 | hiking taxes to pay for welfare. This is a budget for Benefit Street, Madam Deputy Speaker, |
| 1:25.0 | paid for by working people. |
| 1:30.9 | Richard Tice from Reform UK went on a similar theme. |
| 1:37.0 | This is not a budget for workers. This is a budget for those on welfare. It reduces the incentive to work. It reduces the incentive to be an entrepreneur, to be a small business owner. |
| 1:43.6 | And the Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Ed Davy, said there was an alternative to tax rises. |
... |
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