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Hello and welcome to its special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots.

The chance is as we speak preparing his spring statement and the pressures on

government spending are only increasing. Despite Jackie Riesmog saying on Friday that

tax levels are abnormally high and the consumers need to get back to being a tax-cutting

government, the spending requests aren't going anywhere. This week we've had Liz Trust talk

about the need for more defense spending while you have Tory MPs pushing for cost of living

easing and to help their constituents. Okay, before we get, I think to defense spending and how

that might work, can you just give us a bit of an outlook on the general fiscal picture in terms

of the demands on spending that we're seeing? It's not great, it's difficult times for the

chancellor. Riesmog is very used to MPs, even in his own party, putting the demands on him for more

spending. He, of course, became chancellor just weeks before. We really entered the COVID crisis.

Not only did he have to oversee unprecedented amounts of peacetime spending, borrowing,

you know, three hundred fifty four hundred billion pounds in his first year's chancellor,

but he was spending on not just the emergency COVID stuff, but also how you were going to bring

the economy back. He did eat out to help out. He had to come up with all kinds of innovative schemes,

some more successful than others, to try to deal with just this crazy situation.

And of course, that led a lot of his own MPs to say, well, this is an opportunity to try to get

more money for other things, not least the prime minister who decided that this was the moment to

bring in social care reform that frankly, certainly in the medium term has nothing to do with COVID

...