Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve Richards. Thank you very much for tuning in.

This is the podcast where we delve deep, contextualize, and try to make sense of it all.

And after the longest wait in history, the speculation began in 1643, we have had Rachel Reeves' second full budget. And it has been

an extraordinary few weeks of speculation, pitch rolling. And finally, we got it. And what I find so interesting is that there were inevitably a barrage of announcements.

But the broader context, the most fundamental problem for Rachel Reeves, is this is an economy with anemic growth. Now, they might cling to the

fact that other G7 countries have economies growing at similar kind of sclerotic rates, maybe. But when

there are so many demands on the state, which makes public spending cuts a kind of

fantasy in the broader sense, there are specific areas where savings can and should be made,

but across the board of fantasy, as I'll come to a more detail. You have to find money without much economic growth

providing revenues. Now, some in the rock and roll politics cooperative, Nick Radcliffe,

our climate change specialist in Edinburgh, for example, sometimes question my focus on the need for faster economic growth. But without

it, there isn't the money to pay for the NHS, for better trains, for all the things that need to be

done. I'm going to come on to them. And so you have to tax.

Borrowing has become impossible beyond the levels already reached because of the high

interest rates. Rachel Reeves is right about that. When it's astronomically expensive to borrow,

you can't borrow to the same extent. And one of the great frustrations to

contextualise this budget compared with past budgets is that when George Osborne came in as Chancellor in

2010, borrowing for governments was freakishly cheap. He could have borrowed for Britain's creaking infrastructure

then, but chose to cut. And it remains one of the oddities actually about his first budget,

George Osbournes, that he says in the budget, read the budget statement. It's bizarre that one of the

mistakes of the Tory government when dealing with a deficit crisis in the past was to cut capital

spending and he wouldn't do that. But then you looked at the figures and he was cutting capital

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