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I'm Alfa. I'm Anouche. I'm Stephen.

And you're listening to the New Statement Podcast. On today's episode, we discuss the budget, and you ask us, has Nicola Sturgeon done enough to save her career.

So, Rishi Sunak delivered the much anticipated budget yesterday, setting out his plans for the last bit of the coronavirus crisis.

He hopes extending things like furlough for a bit, but then basically announcing an end to the universal credit uplift, an eventual end to the furlough scheme and eventually tax increases and cuts.

Did we all enjoy budget day? Stephen, shall I start with you? What do you think are the key takeaways from this?

The key takeaways are twofold. Firstly, austerity is back, both in rhetoric and in fact, actually there's a really interesting debate here, I think, which is then, if you look at the detail, not what he said, but the detail is actually in the budget.

This is an incredibly esteemed budget because it has a large number of tax rises because the freezes and the various thresholds on income tax entries are all tax rises, freezes and thresholds.

Actually, interestingly, the corporation tax rise, where I'm just like, is that really going to happen? I doubt it somehow.

It just feels like something they can have, which will make all of their fiscal forecasts look a bit better.

The corporation tax rise will have the same rollers. These cuts will be grandfathered into universal credit, did under George Osborne, with then about 4 billion pounds of extra cuts on top of what was already baked in to the previous end of austerity.

Sorry, I don't know why I persist in doing air quotes with my hands in an audio medium, but I do. I just did air quotes there on the end of austerity.

Now, there are two ways to look at that 4 billion. One is to essentially do a variety of people.

Johnson Hopkin, really worthwhile economist, told me if you're on Twitter, the head of the IFS, Paul Johnson, both basically looking at that number and going, if you think that, or as Paul's in second was just like, I would not give you odds of 1 to 10, then that incredibly painful program of cuts to unprotected departments is going to happen.

So there's basically the kind of austerity is back in rhetoric, people who think you can't do that, and they will insist in budget documents, but they won't actually happen broadly defined.

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