Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst.

We're going to look at the mortgage time bomb ticking under the British economy

is Labour front venture, a Bennett-upon-Ossaray,

the Shadow Exchequer Secretary, who's speaking to us on the road in Uxbridge for the by-election,

as well as James

Smith, research director at the Resolution Foundation, and Adam Hawkesby, deputy director at the

centre-right think tank onward.

James, I'm going to start with you. Can you just explain briefly what the kind of rising

interest rates mean where we kind of are now and the kind of

the financial impact that has on households in terms of how that reflects on people's mortgage

payments each month. So we've been on quite a journey. We came out of the pandemic. Everyone was

happy to finish with the pandemic. But then the cost of living crisis arrived with Russia's invasion,

the Ukraine really driving up inflation,

but supply chain disrupts us all like having leaving us with a hangover from the pandemic of

really high inflation. Since then, the Bank of England have really been battling this high

inflation. They've been raising interest rates. They've done that. 13 meetings in a row. That's unprecedented. This is the biggest rate rising cycle

since the late 80s and the overall rate increases so far. But what's really come onto the

radar over the past couple of months is the stickiness of inflation. So if you look at the

labor market, if you look at the inflation data, what you've

really been seeing is inflation, surprising to the upside, but looking stickier than than people

expect. If you look at those underlying measures of inflation, things like services, inflation,

...