The home of common sense. This is talk.

Reacting to the big stories of the day, I'm delighted to welcome the assistant comment editor at the Telegraph, Poppy Coburn.

Good morning, Poppy. Good morning.

Happy Monday to you. Where do we start? I think the message from the Chancellor is it doesn't pay to work with news in your paper that the Chancellor will

be responsible for a 15 billion pound welfare giveaway. Yes, so much for the government of

working people, right? You know, I still remember the manifesto promises. No tax rises on working

people. Well, it's turned out under the Labour government that that's a very flexible definition

of working people, which is now extended to people who don't work at all, which is really fantastic. And if you do work, apparently, that means you're outside of the band. You know, it's a bizarro world. I mean, some of the things that have been floated by the Chancellor in, I think, the longest lead-up to a budget that I've ever heard of. I mean, it's felt like this has been going on for the last three months. Yeah. It's like a Taylor Swift album rollout.

It really is. longest lead up to a budget that I've ever heard of. I mean, it's felt like this has been going on for the last three months. It's like a Taylor Swift album rollout. It's never

ending, have been appalling. It's been all raids on income, which is supposed to be the thing

that you actually get out of bed and do in the morning. You get your income through work,

which the Labour government is actually coming after. It's coming after people who are responsible who do salary sacrifice schemes. If you put more money into your pension, which by the way the government's been saying for over 20 years now, is the responsible thing to do and try to incentivise you doing it, you're going to get taxed more. So that's one thing that's going to be an issue. If you've worked hard, you managed to buy a property, you know, you've done well for yourself, maybe you create jobs in a business, we're going to raid you on council tax. And if you live in the south-east or London, good luck, because property prices are so inflated, you're going to be hit with a massive tax bill, even if your money is a liquid, as it usually is when it's in housing. And if you are, while she's doing all this and saying we all need to tighten our belts, she's bunging a load of money towards things that her backbenchers want. So she's cutting the Tuchab benefit cap, which is going to cost a couple billion. Three billion, yeah. Three billion. She's obviously undone what she did with wind fuel allowance and the triple lock she's completely reversed on that so that's

going to cost a lot of money she's saying she's going to fund it all through

cracking down on benefit fraud if it was that easy everyone would do it there is no

like there is absolutely no room left to squeezing people on benefit fraud

that's not going to find you enough money to fill 15 billion pound gap.

Especially not when you're essentially increasing benefits anyhow.

What is mystifying to me is that this administration conduct themselves as though it was a hung parliament or they had a tiny majority.

They don't seem to be able to do the things that they'd actually like to do.

So they wanted to tackle the spiraling cost of disability benefits, the PIPP scheme, which would have saved £5 billion. The backbenchers said no. Similarly, efforts to keep the two-child benefit

cap, because I think Starmel wanted to keep it, but he's been bullied out of it by his own backbenchers.

This is a prime minister with a vast majority who's got to keep the people on those green benches behind him happy. Make it make sense. Well, I was saying to a colleague of mine, as you say, it's like the final days of the Tories. It's like when Liz Trust has been compared to a lettuce lettuce which is wilting before everyone's eyes,

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