Welcome to F.T. Politics, the Financial Times podcast on British politics. I'm

Sebastian Payne and in this week's episode we'll be looking back on Philip Hammond's pretty successful budget

and the growing tensions over the Irish dimension of Brexit.

I'm delighted to be joined by Chris Giles, our economics editor, Ireland Correspondent Arthur

Beasley, and Political political commentator Miranda Green.

Thank you all for joining.

The stakes were high for Philip Hammond's budget on Wednesday and to the surprise of

much of Westminster it went off without a hitch. Despite the dire growth predictions for the near future,

the Chancellor's rabbit out of the hat and assault on the housing market and slashing stamp duty for the first-time

properties up to 300,000 pounds seemed to work.

Conservative MPs welcomed all the announcements and it was a rare political success for the

May government, not least of all because neighbors response was pretty bad.

Chris Charles looking back after a couple of days since this budget has settled in they often

have a tendency to unravel once you've looked at the details and well actually this

doesn't stack up or it's going to target this level of votes but this one seems to be pretty watertight.

It's watertight in the sense that there hasn't been a political backlash and that's really because there haven't been any tax increases.

The things that normally go badly wrong is the tax increases and everyone says,

why are you raising tax on these lovely people?

Why are you targeting these self-employed strivers or pasti eaters or whatever who are the sort of the earth and there were no tax rises it was only giveaways not big ones but it was only giveaways and so people generally don't complain so much when things were given away. Also expectations

were quite well managed but I don't think people quite realize how bad the

economic forecasts are they are pretty dire so if they are right and there's no reason to think they will be

obviously too pessimistic, then people are not going to be very happy over the next five years.

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