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

I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by Fraser Nelson and James Visef.

The budget was on Wednesday and initially Rishi Sunirk received a positive reception

from Tory MPs and a relatively positive reception from the media that there was some criticism

of the tax hikes.

However, is the real political pay now coming through?

In documents published after the budget, it became clear that the pay rise

that is going to be offered to NHS staff comes to 1%. Kirstama has called for NHS heroes to get a bigger

pay rise and the unions have been quick to go in their attack. James, this has the potential to be

quite a difficult political rower for the government, doesn't it?

Yes. Nurses have clearly worked remarkably hard in the last year because of the pandemic.

And the idea of them getting a kind of 1% pay rise doesn't sound very generous.

Now, it's worth noting that most nurses will get more than 1%

because of kind of progression payments that carry on at the same time. But it is obviously a

political open goal that Labour are desperately trying to fire the ball towards. I personally think

public attitudes to this question will depend very much on what happens to private sector employment. The rationale for the check on public

sector pay was essentially that it wouldn't be fair to have big public sector pay increases at a time

when you've got mass employment out in the country as lots of people in the private sector lose

their jobs. The OBR forecast for

unemployment now is now down to, I think, just below 7%, which is down from the expectation that it

would be around 12%. I think if that figure continues to fall, it becomes more difficult politically

...