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Hello and welcome to Coffey House Shots of Spectators Daily Politics

Podcast.

I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by Kate Andrews and James Heel.

So we just had the Tory Manifesto launch

I suppose just to kick us off in a sentence or two Kate

did we learn anything new?

Not much we got one new tax cut that hadn't been briefed to the papers beforehand,

which was a cut to abolish employee national insurance for the self-employed entirely,

which is going to cost about 2.5 billion

pounds over the next parliament.

Everything else we knew that they're going to continue on the

pathway to cutting national insurance for workers and that they're going to try to pay the bulk of this anyway by cutting welfare benefits by about 12 billion pounds.

So if you look at the sums, technically they add up.

They are very ambitious where those cuts from welfare come from,

especially if we go back over the past 14 years

of the Tory government, and we see disproportionately

where cuts came from before.

How much more are we really going to cut away at?

...