Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home with me Alan Tolhurst.

This week, focusing in on the budget.

After another momentous tax-raising fiscal event from Rachel Reeves,

we're running the rule over further freezes to tax thresholds,

the scrapping of the two-child limit on benefits,

reforms to savings, pensions and ices, as well as motoring and property taxes, and a host of cost-loving measures too. Oh, and the fact the whole thing was leaked half an hour before the Chancellor stood up in the comments to deliver it. To discuss all that and much more on this bumper episode, we're going to hear from the shadow Chancellor Mel Stride, the Treasury Minister Lucy Rigby,

economists from the Resolution Foundation and IPPR think tanks, as well as Labour MP Yuan Yang,

who sits on the Treasury Select Committee. But we'll start first with Mel.

So Mel, welcome back to the rundown. We're speaking the day after the budget.

You've just done the morning media round, and you're about to speak, I think, in the budget debate, in the Commons.

So just at this point, and what are your kind of overall thoughts on the package as outlined by Rachel Reeves yesterday?

Well, I think she's taken the wrong choices.

So what she's fundamentally decided to do is to come back for yet more tax increases,

26 billion pounds worth in total, on hardworking people up and down the country, at the same

time to increase the benefits bill, principally by scrapping the two-child benefit cap and filling

in the hole that she created when they didn't get through the welfare reforms a month or so

back. And I think they're just the wrong choices. I think that's why you're seeing weaker growth

across the forecast, higher inflation, lowering of living standards compared to the spring

forecast from the OBR earlier in the year. And what they should really be doing is getting on top

of government spending, particularly welfare in order to drive taxes down, get growth going and get people feeling better off. Yeah, we'll come on some of those kind of individual measures in a second. I just want to kind of take a step back slightly. You know, often a budget speech is kind of a bit of a laundry list of kind of ideas and things, the policies you want to do. But often, again, the best ones, they kind of hanged together a bit more with more of a kind of a bit of a laundry list of kind of ideas and things or policies you want to do. But often, again, the best ones, they kind of hang together a bit more with more of a kind of a political and kind of strategic message. Did you kind of get a sense there is a coherent strategy or is there kind of a politics that hangs all together? There's been criticism that maybe it's kind of a budget just to kind of keep the show on the road for a couple more months, a couple more years and doesn't have that kind of that politics kind of in the background?

I think that's absolutely right. I don't think there is a sense of an overarching strategy here,

which should be about growth and improving living standards. And I think that's in part because

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