Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Muncho and with me, I'm Zanamunzank and

Jack Smith. Today we want to talk about solvency, about debt. European countries all have problems,

not all, but many have problems with rising levels of debt to GDP. We see these increases in France.

It has bedeviled successive French governments for a while.

We see this in some of the smaller countries.

And yesterday the issue came back with a vengeance to the UK,

not just yesterday, but the entire last week.

Jack, tell us about what happened in the UK where we are after the

tearful event in the House of Commons yesterday and where this is likely to go. Well, I think

where we are after this is that it's proven to be very difficult for the labor government in the

UK to basically deliver fiscal consolidations, budget consolidations by cutting

spending. I think that's proven to be the case, especially this week, because what happened

is that the labor government, Kier Starrmer, Liz Kendall, who's the responsible kind of welfare

minister, and Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, had come up with a plan to try and limit benefit

spending in coming years, welfare spending in coming years, by basically reducing spending

on especially disability benefits. Now, that produced a backlash within the Labour Party. Normally, labor has a huge majority in the House of Commons,

but the rebellion amongst backbench MPs against the spending cuts was large enough to

potentially ensure the government's defeat on the bill. So what the government then had to do was deliver a

bunch of concessions to these backbench rebels that wiped out a large amount of the savings

that they were supposed to make in the first place. This really weakened Kier Starmer's

standing. It certainly weakened Liz Kendall standing, and it also weakened Rachel

Reeves' standing, which is where we get to today, where we've had questions this week about

...