The New Statesman. With the autumn budget looming, the government has some tough decisions to make.

Rachel Reeves has to find a predicted £30 billion in extra revenue to meet her self-imposed fiscal rules.

But as part of its manifesto pledges, Labour promised not to raise income tax, national insurance or VAT.

And after a crushing defeat in Wales last week, what can the government actually get away with doing without angering the public further?

I'm Anusha Kellyan and this is the New Statesman podcast.

Joining me today is Steve Akehurst, a polling analyst who can share some exclusive research

he's done on Labor's tax promises, which he's sharing for the first time with us today. Hi, Steve. Hello. Hi. Would you mind, I know you've been on this podcast before, but can you introduce yourself to our listeners, please? Tell us who you are. Sure. So I, yeah, I'm a polling analyst. I run Persuasion UK. So Persuasion UK is a non-profit, non-partisan

research initiatives. We try and get underneath the skin of public opinion on different topics as well as looking at the way the electorate's changing. So yeah, that's what I do. I'm also, yeah, a loyal New Statesman podcast fan. So this is as good as it gets for me, right? Okay, good. That is not a prerequisite for coming on the podcast, let me just say, for future guests, but it is very nice to hear. So can you explain a bit about why this polling that you've been doing is new? You know, it does something that we haven't seen in polling before on this topic. Yeah, sure. So I think there's a lot of polling on the economy that kind of starts and ends with. What do people think about these kind of short-term policy measures? And that's good. That's important. Like, we have a lot of that in the research. But I think the thing that's most interesting about this is it trying to get underneath things a little bit more and looks at not just the kind of short-term

risks and rewards around decision-making, but what are the kind of counterfactuals?

What are the kind of things that voters will kind of truly punish and reward the government for

over the long term? So it's trying to get at, yeah, not just testing should they do this or

that policy, but what happens if they don't do this or that policy or that policy? It's just a slightly longer term view

and trying to basically force the kind of trade-offs on voters that the government actually

faces. That's really interesting because usually in sort of basic polling on these kind of issues,

the trade-offs don't come under it, do they? So you have a question, do you want to tax the wealthy more? You know, people will just tick yes. Or do you want your taxes to go up? People will tick no. But if you start asking them questions after that, such as, you know, if your taxes went up, but it meant that, you know, child poverty started to be eradicated or the cost of living was more manageable, then you start to see slightly different results. So that's that's that trade-off idea. Sorry, that's a very basic explanation of what you're doing in your polling. But that's what makes it different from the usual headline kind of public attitudes that we see on potential tax solutions. Yes, exactly.

Yeah.

There's, of course, no perfect way of studying this.

But I think this is a kind of what we've done here is a little bit, a little bit different and a bit more in depth for that, for that reason. Yeah. And so you've looked at this in depth. What do you actually find? What stood out to you? So maybe I'll explain a little bit first about kind of how we went about this particular bit in the experiment.

So what we did was basically invited like 4,000 people into a survey and instead of just asking

questions on do you support this or that policy, what we did is showed the government's record

at the end of this parliament. Okay. So we said, look, imagine this is the record that the Labor

government stands for re-election on. And they had three good

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