The Most Boring Budget?

So now we are going to get on with the budget.

Okay.

In our notes, of course, the first thing that's in there is some discussion of the rhetoric that used by Chancellor John Healey when he delivered the budget to the House of Commons.

That's the lower house of the UK legislature.

So Alan, do you want to say something about the rhetoric, the terminology, the language?

But I do like to plug these things, yeah? Because this is what I know about.

But no, it's just, it was interesting.

I listened to it in a car while driving between Manchester and Norwich.

And he's quite a sort of measured sort of speaker in some ways, but he stumbles over a lot of his words, which I found quite...

I find that kind of thing interesting why he would do that, yeah? But it's very...

Thinking about it historically as a budget speech, it's relatively untechnical, I think.

We're going to come to this later on.

We'll compare it with an earlier budget speech.

Quite a sort of...

It's clearly written in part for much wider audiences than just economists and so forth.

But what got me was the number of times he kept talking about the Labour way.

We will solve this in a Labour way because the budget knocks a lot of things down the road around welfare reform, for example.

And his response was that we will sort this out in a Labour way.

And he kept talking about this Labour government, a Labour budget produced by this Labour government.

And it reminded me of his conference speech, which was very sort of steeped in nostalgia for the past, for the mining village that he is mining, the ex-mining areas that he's the MP for and so forth.

And I'm just curious what people think that is for.

Because that seems, it seems an odd little tick.

I cannot believe a Conservative minister, someone can look this up and prove me wrong, would ever say this is a Conservative government with a Conservative budget.

I think they would just say this is the budget for the country.

Because there's something, and there's a lot, I've got a lot of, sorry, I'm being brilliant here today.