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Welcome to F.T. Politics, a weekly podcast on British politics from the Financial Times.

I'm Sebastian Payne, digital comment editor,

and this week it is a budget special.

We'll be dissecting George Osborne's eighth budget as Chancellor

and what it means both politically and economically.

To do this I'm delighted to be joined by the best brains in the country, George Osborne's

former chief of staff Robert Harrison

who is now chief macro stativist for multi asset strategies at Black Rock

and Stephanie Flanders chief market strategies for Europe at J.P. Morgan

as well as an FT contributor. Thank you all for joining.

So I'll begin by asking you what you made of it.

Do you think it was a good budget and did it achieve anything?

Stephanie?

Well, I think if you just did it on the merits, you wouldn't say it was a particularly good budget.

At the beginning of a parliament, you might have wanted to see a strong reforming line running

...