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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Oscar Mninson and I'm joined today by James Heel and Kate Andrews.

And we have some new inflation figures. Kate, can you take us through them?

So the data for August shows that inflation stuck at

2.2% in the 12 months leading up to August. That is unchanged from July's figure. This is slightly

above the Bank of England's target of 2%, but it's pretty much spot on. It's a good news story

on the surface of it. If you dig into the details, there's a little

bit of caution to flag. We saw that core inflation, which excludes more volatile prices like food

and energy, actually rose in the 12 months on the year from 3.3% in July to 3.6% in August.

There was also a bump in services inflation, which was largely driven by increases in

airfares. So you do still see some prices drifting upwards, but a lot of this has been taken

into account. The Bank of England's latest projections do you think that the headline inflation

figure will get slightly closer to 3% before the end of the year, but then fall back down even potentially below its

target in 2025. So the fact that it's hovering in the right place now is good news. This is

just nothing like what we experienced the past couple of years when it came to the inflation crisis.

Markets are still not expecting for the Bank of England to further reduce the base rate tomorrow.

They expect that that's going to happen later on in the year, potentially in their November meeting.

But today's data doesn't really change that projection.

...