Rachel Reeves’s farcical Budget
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 26 November 2025
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As Budget days go, today was unprecedented. The complete list of measures announced by Rachel Reeves – along with their costings and economic impacts – was leaked by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) an hour before the Chancellor took to her feet. The OBR apologised and called it a ‘technical error’.
The headline is tax hikes to the tune of £26 billion, income tax thresholds will be frozen again and the tax burden will hit a record high at 38 per cent of GDP. Was this the most farcical Budget in history?
Michael Simmons speaks to James Heale and Tim Shipman.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Subscribe to The Spectator in our Black Friday Flash Sale and you'll get 12 weeks of the magazine, along with full access to all of our online content, for just £12. Not only that, but we'll also send you a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label Whiskey worth £30 on the shops, absolutely free. |
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| 0:25.3 | Spectator.com.ukuk forward slash Friday. |
| 0:35.5 | Hello and welcome to Coffee Out Shots. I'm Michael Simmons, the Spectators Economics Editor. |
| 0:40.6 | And today I'm joined by our political team Tim Shipman and James Heel. Tim and James, thanks for joining us. |
| 0:47.8 | Now, we've all got incredibly excited about the full budget leaking, something that's never happened in this level of detail. |
| 0:55.0 | Tim, are we overreacting? |
| 0:56.0 | No, I don't think so. |
| 0:58.0 | I mean, I remember a few years ago when the Treasury briefed the evening standard some of the key measures in the budget, |
| 1:03.0 | and it came out that morning. |
| 1:05.0 | And there was absolutely, you know, sort of everything exploded. |
| 1:08.0 | People were saying, this is disgraceful, this is undermining |
| 1:11.5 | democracy. You've got to announce it first in the House of Commons. You know, this appears to be |
| 1:16.0 | cock up rather than conspiracy, but it does rather cap what has been the most turbulent |
| 1:20.4 | pre-budget process I can remember in 25 years doing political journalism. And these things can |
| 1:26.2 | tend to be seen as symbolic of a government |
| 1:28.6 | that's a bit of drift that's having a lot of problems, reconciling the economics and the politics. |
| 1:33.2 | And this dropped like a stone an hour before the Chancellor stood up. And she was chastised by the |
| 1:39.7 | deputy speaker. It would have been quite entertaining if the deputy speaker said, well, |
| 1:42.9 | the budget's already out there. You can stick your speech in the library, sit down and we'll hear straight away from the leader of the opposition. That's probably what the government deserved. They'll say it's not their fault. It's the OBR's fault. And I think they will try to find a way of easing out the head of the OBR who they don't like anyway, but it is totally unprecedented. And, you know, |
| 2:01.9 | in the older days, this would have been a resignation matter for somebody. So we've watched this |
... |
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