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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Cindy Yu and I'm joined by Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth.

So today is day three of the budget landing and more analysis of the budget and the economic forecasts are happening, leading to some banks,

including HSBC and NatWest, to increase their mortgage rates in reaction.

Isabel, can you tell us what's going on here?

Yeah, so this is a part of the sort of toxic mix following the budget of a high tax burden, rising

inflation, and now, as you say, mortgage lenders

dropping their cheapest deals because they are anticipating that there's going to be an interest rate

rise coming down the line. So you've got, I think, Virgin Money, Barclays, Halifax, HSBC and

Nat West who are changing their mortgage deals for a lot of people, which obviously means

a sharper cost of living crisis. And it's going to be very difficult for a lot of people. It's also

very interesting politically because it's been Labour's main attack line since about 2012 and it hasn't

really had much effect. We've had lots of different cost of living crises, whether it was energy

bills, but we've had those again recently cost of living crises, whether it was energy bills,

we've had those again recently, and now we're facing the Rishi-Soonak cost-of-living crisis.

And there's not been any evidence, and I've been talking to Labour people about this,

that actually them talking about cost of living makes that much difference to the electorate. And particularly the

political attack line that Labor tends to choose to use, which is this out-of-touch Tory government. And

one of the reasons they do that with Rishi Sunak is obviously he's loaded. He has a coffee cup that's

worth more than a pair of shoes for most people, blah, blah, blah. But Labor thinks that people care about this.

People don't seem to care about it.

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