Budget Preview Special

Let's be speculative about not being speculative, I think.

I think that's a good start.

So, Nick, we are kind of living in a sort of very strange era at the minute because the news is there kind of isn't really much news.

There's no sort

of

tidbits.

There's nothing...

And this is going across the board.

This is not just specific to pensions.

There's not really any sort of feeling of this is what's going to be in it.

And of course, that may change with the Sunday papers because the Sunday papers are usually quite hot on this sort of stuff.

But, From memory, if I remember our chat last year, our chat last year was roughly about the same distance of time away from Budget Day when

we did the recording.

And there was quite a lot of rumour and speculation flying around.

Now, if memory serves me correctly, not a lot of the speculation kind of came to pass.

Hmm.

But there was quite a lot to still get your teeth into.

And this has been a kind of consistent trend.

If you're a B2B journalist in general and you follow budgets this quite tightly, certainly ever since I've been a professional journalist, it was 2019, There was always something.

There was always kind of tidbits.

You kind of heard things in advance of Budget Day.

And there wasn't really any sort of surprises.

And the idea is that you put out feelings in the media and you kind of get a vague idea of how markets and business leaders will react to your news and then react.

You kind of pull it out if there's a particular adverse reaction.

And equally, if there's a positive reaction towards something, you kind of big it up in your speech.