Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for the 27th of November 2025.

I'm John by Dan and Josh.

Hello.

And today we're going to be talking about the doomsday budget that is way worse than you may have imagined at first blush,

uh, that America is finding out that actually maybe, just maybe bringing in all of these Afghans as consequences.

And then we're going to be talking about the most ability aristocracy that you're paying for. They just love being a surf. I love being a surf. It's so fucking great. Anyway, before we begin, tomorrow, Friday at 3 o'clock, we have the gold Zoom call for our gold tier subscribers. So if you're a gold tier subscriber, I will see you then. But until then, let's begin. I think they've also got the Americans got their warm-up Christmas today, the Thanksgiving thing. Oh, okay. I've had dozens of Americans over the years trying to explain to me why it's not just a rehearsal Christmas because they have a turkey dinner and stuff, but none of they've been able to convince me. To be honest with you, I'm sold. I like the idea of it. Oh, no, it's a good idea. Yeah. I like the idea of a second Christmas as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. So, yes, Rachel Reeves' budget, which I am dubbing her choice, your money. So one of the things I won't be able to do is go through all the ways in which this budget is bad, because the way budgets work is she stands up in the House of Commons and gives us a little blah, blah, blah, and then the detail is all buried in the document. Yes. And so it normally takes a good few days to a week or so to wash through all the things that have gone bad. But, I mean, this is just one of the things that we picked up this morning. You know, this Sasha Lord chap here was saying his phone's off the hook because the

Chancellor announced help for hospitality. It turns out what that help was was

hospitality was going to help fill the coffers for her. Massive tax rises.

Yeah, because it turns out it's a massive tax increase. And we've got various people, such as this poor lady here, saying that her pub rates, business rates have gone from 18 and a half grand to 73 grand. It's almost quadrupled. Yes. I mean, and she posts a screenshot of it just down a little bit, doesn't she? I believe it does. This is just mad.

So pretty much every pub outside

of London is going to

disappear. Yeah, I mean look, rateable

value in 2023 was

18,500

and now it's 73,000, who can

afford that kind of rate of inflation?

No one. That is mad.

And this went down as helping hospitality in the budget.

So there's going to be loads of things like that where we're not going to know the true

horror of what's in the budget until everybody has a chance to crunch the numbers that have

been hidden away in it.

So I can only give you the sort of top line stuff.

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