The New Statesman.

While many on the left were calling for a wealth tax, yesterday the Chancellor delivered a stealth tax.

How will her platter of sneaky revenue streams boost the government's finances?

And what does it mean in the long term economically for the country?

I'm Anusha Kellyan and this is the New Statesman podcast and I'm joined now by our business

editor, Will Dunn. Hello. Hello. Hello. And our political editor Alvaree. Hello.

Will, you've asked in your online analysis of the budget whether it was actually written by

Jeremy Hunt and we know from a recent profile of Rachel Reeves in the FT that

she actually brings Jeremy Hunt up for a vice. So maybe it was. So why did you think that this

had Jeremy Hunt's fingerprints on it? I mean, perhaps I'm a little bit unfair to Jeremy Hunt sometimes,

but I think in this budget you see the same patterns repeated.

I mean, first of all, it does strike me as a bit crazy that you would phone up the man who

has done the most to torpedo your chances of succeeding in government for advice on how to

succeed in government.

Because if you look at Jeremy Hunt's last budget, I think I previously described it as

a plan for chaos in that it was, you know, setting up tax cuts that the country couldn't

afford.

That was the basis of the black hole.

The main point in that, that 22 billion pound black hole was the cut to national insurance contributions that had a proper spending review being conducted. It would have been obvious that the country couldn't afford. But also, you know, he penciled in a period of austerity that he knew he was never going to have to impose because it would be up to somebody else.

So those kind of machinations were a real problem for H-R-Ease as she came into government and then she's voting up.

But it also sort of seems to make sense because they are kind of in the same position and they are sort of

forming the same kind of policy in that they are producing budgets where, you know, like

...