Hunt says presenter’s comments ‘unworthy of BBC’ after he suggested budget not enough to revive ‘stagnant’ economy – UK politics live | Politics

Amol Rajan may have been understating the problems facing Britain in his question to Jeremy Hunt this morning (see 10.33am), if the Institute for Fiscal Studies’s assessment is anything to go by.

This is how Paul Johnson, the IFS director, opened his speech at the IFS presentation where its experts have been explaining the significance of what was announced yesterday.

Nothing that Jeremy Hunt did yesterday, nor anything the OBR said, changes anything very significantly. Which is a shame. Because that means we are still:

-heading for a parliament in which people will on average be worse off at the end than at the start,

-looking at a debt to GDP ratio that is at its highest level in 70 years and is showing no signs of falling;

-facing debt interest payments at close to all time highs;

-seeing worrying increases in the number of individuals moving onto health and disability related benefits, bringing huge challenges for those households and rising costs for the public purse;

-(despite the genuinely significant cuts in NICs) stuck with a situation where tax revenues will have risen by a record amount as a share of national income over this parliament and still heading towards UK record levels;

-implicitly planning on big cuts in public investment spending overall and cuts to many areas of day-to-day spending on public services despite very obvious signs of strain in many areas.

All of that was true on Tuesday, and all of it remains true today. In all likelihood it will still be true come the general election.

I will post more from the IFS assessment shortly.

Jeremy Hunt has accused a Today presenter of being “not worthy of the BBC” after he suggested the budget did not do enough to revive Britain’s “stagnant” economy.

Towards the end of what was otherwise a relatively good-tempered interview, Amol Rajan said:

This might be, and you’ll say you don’t want it to be, one of your last big acts in politics. Do you really think you’ve read the moment?

This is a country ravaged by economic shocks, at best drifting, at worse, stagnant. We all know about its potential, but we’ve had seven quarters of falling GDP per head, that’s been revised downwards.

We’re hooked on foreign labour, the birth rate is collapsing. Many public services are creaking, councils are going bust.

Those are facts, has your budget really come even close to meeting the scale of the challenges this country faces?

In response, Hunt said:

I think the overall characterisation that you’ve just given of the British economy is unworthy of the BBC.

Rajan insisted that there was “no such thing as ‘the BBC’”, because so many different people worked there, and he said he was “just putting to you facts about this country”. But Hunt replied: “It’s unworthy of you Amol.”

The Resolution Foundation has described pensioners as the the biggest losers from the budget.

In its analysis, it says:

Looking beyond just employees, though, personal taxes are still going up significantly, with threshold freezes exceeding value of NI rate cuts by £20bn (£41bn versus £21bn). What’s going on? £8bn is being raised by the freezes to thresholds for employer NI, which in time should feed through into lower pay levels for employees. And there is a big group of losers: pensioners, who are already exempt from NI but affected by freezes to income tax thresholds. All 8 million taxpaying pensioners will see their taxes increase, by an average of £1,000 – an £8bn collective hit. This approach is justified with tax cuts focused on working-age employees and the self-employed, who currently pay higher rates of tax than pensioners or landlords, but it is a staggering turnaround from the approach of Conservative governments since 2010, who have generally focused support on pensioners.

Commenting on the figures, Sarah Olney, the Lib Dem Treasury spokesperson, said:

This Conservative government has shown their true colours, pensioners are not their priority. They would rather cut taxes for the big banks than look after those who have given so much for so long to our society.

But Jeremy Hunt rejected this claim. He told Sky News:

We’ve done an enormous amount for pensioners. This government introduced the triple lock … we have really prioritised pensioners.

Household incomes are on course to fall for the first time over the course of a parliament despite Jeremy Hunt’s national insurance cuts, the Resolution Foundation thinktank has said in its assessment of the budget. Phillip Inman has the story.

Jeremy Hunt has conceded that the Conservative will not be able to abolish employees’ national insurance, as he has said he would like to do (see 9.28am), any time soon,

Asked when this might happen, he told Times Radio:

That’s a huge job. (National insurance) raises an enormous amount of money. And I don’t think it’s realistic to say that’s going to happen any time soon. But I do want to end the unfairness of a system where the income you get from work is taxed twice through income tax and national insurance.

The Resolution Foundation thinktank has published its assessment of the budget. At a news conference, James Smith, the RF’s research director, said Jeremy Hunt’s £20bn national insurance giveaway was funded by planned cuts to public spending that were so implausible they amounted to “fiscal fiction”. He said:

The government are pencilling overall day-to-day spending numbers beyond the end of the spending review, from 2025-26 onwards.

And if you take out what the government has said it will guarantee in terms of health, defence, education, then you end up with those unprotected departments … with really, really big cuts. So this is something like three-quarters of the intensity of the cuts that we got from 2010 and it’s getting on for £20bn. So you can think of tax cuts, the £20bn national insurance giveaway that we’ve had since autumn has been essentially funded by these fiscal fiction spending cuts that are pencilled in.

Smith also said the UK has had almost two decades without real-terms wage growth. He said:

We don’t get back to the pre-2008 level of real wages until 2026. So that’s nearly two lost decades of real wage growth. So that’s an incredibly bleak backdrop in terms of living standards.

If you look at overall income, this is going to be the first parliament, which we have comparable income data for, where income is actually falling in real household disposable income terms.

Good morning. If a budget is going to unravel, that often starts to happen on day two, after the initial headlines have gone and when the experts start to unpack what it really means. So far, there is not much sign of that happening, because Jeremy Hunt did not announce much yesterday that had not been well trailed in advance. But the reaction in Tory circles is a bit flat. And Labour has leapt on one of the more half-hearted proposals in the budget to make the case that Hunt is being even more irresponsible than Liz Truss.

Hunt said yesterday the Tories had a “long-term ambition” to get rid of employees’ national insurance. And in an email to Tory supporters last night Hunt said (bold text from the original):

This time, we’ve cut national insurance AGAIN – from 10% to 8%.

In total, across both tax cuts, that means the average British worker keeps £900 more a year.

But there’s further to go. I’d like to end the unfairness where people in work are paying tax twice on their earnings.

We want a simpler, fairer tax system where you only pay tax once.

If we stick with our plan that’s working, we’ll be able to make progress towards that goal in the next parliament.

Labour says this would cost £46bn. It has sent out this briefing with the costings.

It would cost many tens of billions to abolish NICs (national insurance contributions) entirely:

£39.96bn to abolish employee NICs main rate, going from 8p to 0p

£2.28bn to abolish self-employed NICs, going from a 6p rate to 0p

£2.9bn to abolish employee NICs additional rate, going from 2p to 0p

£0.54bn to abolish self-employed NICs additional rate, going from 2p to 0p

That means that in total Jeremy Hunt wants to deliver £46bn of unfunded tax cuts

That is £1bn more than the £45bn of unfunded tax cuts in the disastrous Truss mini-budget.

Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, has been giving interviews this morning. She said that Labour is constantly being challenged to explain how it will fund its pledges (she admitted she now has to find money to pay for the proposals that would have been funded by the abolition of non-dom status), but Hunt now had to explain how he would fund a £46bn cut. She told the Today programme:

You just asked me how I’m going to find £2.1bn, and I will do that.

But the government yesterday suggested that are going to cut national insurance entirely at a cost of £46bn pounds a year. That is a bigger unfunded commitment to tax cuts than even Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng tried.

So the question to the chancellor is, is this a real promise, is this a real commitment? And, if so, how is that going to be funded? I want taxes on working people to come down. But I’m never going to make a commitment without saying where the money is going to come from.

Hunt has also been giving interviews this morning. I will post more from both interview rounds shortly.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9am: The Resolution Foundation publishes its budget analysis at a press conference.

9.30am: Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

10.30am: The Institute for Fiscal Studies publishes its budget analysis at a press conference.

Morning: Rishi Sunak takes part in a Q&A in a pub in Yorkshire.

Morning: Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves visit a building site in London.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

After 11.30am: MPs resume their debate on the budget.

After 12pm: Rishi Sunak is interviewed on Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine show.

1pm: Badenoch gives a speech at the Global Trade conference.

Also, David Cameron, the foreign secretary, is visiting Berlin.

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