Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home with me Alan Tolhurst.

This week, we're taking a look at the state of the economy after a low-key spring statement

from the Chancellor Rachel Reeves, which suggested there were the green shoots of a potential recovery,

only for the outbreak of war in the Middle East to send shockwaves through the gilt markets and threatening another period of stagflation and choke off any longed for economic growth. So to discuss whether Reeves was right to try and not make a splash this week, or if she was being too passive in the face of global headwinds and a failure to make a dent in unemployment, and delighted to be joined by Labour MP Luke Murphy,

who sits on the Treasury Select Committee, and alongside him we have James Smith,

chief economist of the Resolution Foundation, and Nick Ridpath, research economist at the Institute

for Fiscal Studies.

So Nick, Rachel Reeve said that she had restored economic stability in the face of some global uncertainty in the spring statement. Just talk us through what we got from Rachel Reeves said that she had restored economic stability in the face of some global uncertainty

in the spring statement. Just talk us through what we got from Rachel Reeves, what the figures

that she announced were. What we saw from the spring forecast was that, like, for the last

three months, and it's only been three months, I think that's an important thing to remember.

We've had until the last week or so, a period of kind of relative economic quiet, definitely compared

to what we saw last year.

And I think that was reflecting the forecast.

Broadly, it was pretty close to unchanged.

We saw a bit of a boost to revenues, mostly coming from higher equity prices, which we

can talk a bit about later.

But broadly, and that some of that was taken up by some extra small policy things

that we've seen over the last few months, mostly changes and top-ups to special educational

need spending.

But broadly, the overall view, if you look at the government's plans for borrowing over

the next five years, they look as close to unchanged as it will be possible for them to look. And I think that's really

...