Are you a 'working person'?
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 14 July 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tomorrow Rachel Reeves will deliver her big speech in the City. The annual Mansion House address is a chance for the Chancellor to set out her vision for the British economy. But amid a gloomy set of economic indicators (including two consecutive monthly GDP contractions) it is difficult to see what good news she can offer.
Westminster would be alive with speculation about what she might announce – initially, there was talk of reforms to cash ISAs; now, attention has turned to the prospect of Reeves promising a ‘new Big Bang’ by slashing regulation on financial services – however everyone is busy trying to work out who are the ‘working people’ the Labour government has pledged not to raise taxes for?
Are they – as Heida Alexander argued over the weekend – ‘people on modest incomes’? Or, as Darren Jones suggested today, ‘anyone that gets a payslip, basically’? That is quite a difference in definition – so who exactly is a ‘working person’?
James Heale speaks to Tim Shipman and Michael Simmons.
Produced by Oscar Edmondson.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Very quickly, before this podcast starts, I wanted to remind Coffeehouse Shots listeners that we are down to our last few tickets for tomorrow's live podcast at the Emanuel Center in Westminster. |
| 0:10.9 | Join our editor Michael Gove, Tim Schittman and Isabel Hardman, as they debate the question, are the Tories Toast? |
| 0:17.1 | Go to www.com.com.com.com.com for tickets or click the link in the bio. |
| 0:24.0 | The economic tumult of the past month has forced many people to take another look at their finances |
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| 0:49.4 | For more information, visit www.charl-htonstanly.com.uk today to schedule a free, no-obligation |
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| 1:04.8 | Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm James Hill. I'm joined today by Michael |
| 1:08.5 | Simmons and Tim Shipman. Now, tomorrow, Rachel Reeves will be making the annual Mansion House speech. Tim, we've had a series of bad economic indicators out, two GDP contractions month on month. What on earth can Rachel Reeves say tomorrow? |
| 1:22.4 | That's a very good question, but the attempt is to stabilise the markets and get everybody feeling a bit better. So there's |
| 1:28.2 | been lots of sort of little announcements about things we're trying to do one this morning about |
| 1:33.2 | helping sort of people in impoverished kids, which even the toys have had to issue a sort of supportive |
| 1:40.0 | press release say, well, this builds on something we did. So there's a lot of trying to get the |
| 1:44.2 | feel-good factor back. I'm sure she'll be pointing to the government of the Bank of England |
| 1:48.7 | saying that we could accelerate the pace of interest rate cuts. Though, of course, that's only |
| 1:54.8 | because the employment market is so poor. And as he rightly observed in his interview this morning, |
| 2:00.8 | lots of businesses have |
... |
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