Four minutes after ten, you remember when they were telling the lie about austerity being necessitated by Labor's economic policy?

Some people still spout this nonsense, you know, the global financial crisis brought about largely by subprime mortgages being sold in America and the packaging up of debt internationally, causing economic collapse across pretty much all of the civilised world.

Do you remember it was all Gordon Brown's fault? People still do this, that joke that, I forget

who it was, the chief secretary to the Treasury left on his desk saying all the money had gone.

And then people who sadly lack either the wit or the inclination to understand history

or politics, pretend that that was some

sort of admission of guilt or something like that. That was all hilarious from one perspective

and tragic from another, as with most things, fermented by right-wing media in this country.

It was an exercise in deluding the British people into both acting against their own

interest and blaming entirely

the wrong people when things go wrong. But they can't do that now. So it is quite diverting,

isn't it, to hear Tories and their supporters in the media trying to make sense of a budget

that is necessitated by economic disaster 12 years after the governing party came to power.

The slightly ridiculous attempt, you see it a little bit on social media, to blame it all on

either coming out of the lockdown or the invasion of Ukraine falls apart when you look at the

performance of other countries. The uniquely British nature of our uniquely British crisis is, well, however you cut and dice it, it's got to be the responsibility of

whoever's been in charge, or in large part, the responsibility of whoever's been in charge for the last

12 years. And then you remember yesterday's show, when we pointed out that 55 days have passed

between conservative politicians

cheering a budget that was the polar opposite of what was announced yesterday. I must have used

the phrase polar opposite several thousand times in the course of yesterday's program and it's not

a particularly felicitous phrase is it? But I mean it worked didn't it polar absolute polar opposite how can they even show their faces in public eight members of the current cabinet were in the last one i couldn't stop thinking about it yesterday well i could actually had a rather splendid lunch which steve allen may have shared some details of with you earlier. But I mean, it is absolutely

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