25/11/2015 The Papers

the Manchester United game against PSV, and Man City against Juventus,

and we meet the teenage weightlifting sensation after the

Papers. Hello and welcome to our look

ahead to what the the papers With me are Isabel Hardman,

assistant editor at the Spectator, and Ben Chu, the Independent's

economics editor. The FT says the government's deficit

reduction strategy will now depend more on tax rises

than on further cuts, as the public appetite

for austerity wanes. The Metro echoes the famous

declaration of Margaret Thatcher, as it headlines

Mr Osborne's two policy reversals. The i has the same play

on the Thatcher quote. The Guardian highlights the squeeze

on local government, it says councils will see a near halving

of their central government grant. The Express says the Chancellor's

protection of foreign aid spending is

a political gamble when taxes rise. The Telegraph says the U-turn on

working tax credit marks the end of austerity. The Daily Mail would like

to know, whatever happened to austerity? We will start with the

Metro, the Tories are for turning, everyone expected a softening of the

cuts to working tax credits, not that they would be completely

scrapped, but he has completely scrapped them, surprised everybody.

A smart move by the Chancellor, no-one and could pick over the

details of the mitigation, saying that there is a problem here or

there. Everyone was so surprised that he had managed to scrap those

cuts entirely, so even though some people will still be affected by

lower tax credit payments when they are rolled into universal credit, it

became a good news story for him. And I think it rectified some of the

damage that has been done to his reputation, to his character over

the past few weeks, to have someone saying, I have listened to concerns

and changed my mind is quite important in politics, particularly

for George Osborne. He looks reasonable. He had carried on

resisting those concerns for too long. The 27, 29 billion stuff down

the back of the sofa, when would he have found out about that? In the

weeks leading up to the statement. OK, in the weeks leading up to the

statement, sober for the vote on working tax credits? I am not sure

of the timing, but the Chancellor generally has good sign of what

numbers are going into the Autumn Statement, not least because there

is too and fro between the Treasury and the OBR about what will go into

the document. You would not have thought before and? Not judging by

the look on his face when he lost the vote! These headlines are about

three quarters right, on tax credits, it is a big reversal, on

public spending, the squeeze will be considerably less than was

expected, but there is a lot of departments which are still having

extremely large squeezes, and he will still get this 10 billion

surplus at the end of the Parliament, and this is something

that a lot of economists say is not necessary to get the public finances

on an even keel. They think you only need a current budget surplus,

excluding capital spending. I do not think we should take this too far

and say austerity is over, but there will be a lot of public spending

cuts to come. Let's go to your paper, do the numbers add up? A Venn

diagram, some kind of diagram, like a wheel with lots of black bits and

red bits, can we bring that up for the viewers to see? There it is.

Now, I am going to let you explain this diagram, do the figures add up?

Well, what you're looking at is a Catherine wheel of a income that is

the best way to describe it. The red bars are cuts announced today, so

very big for transport, justice, local government, Home Office. The

protected departments, overseas aid, health, you can see the bars going

up, and you can see the pain since 2010, since austerity started, so

over the full decade you can see how big some of the cuts have been to

places like transport, business, justice, getting on for 50%, perhaps

even more. It is really trying to sum up the whole decade of

austerity, if you like, you can see how uneven it has been, how some

departments are fared relatively well, others have been hit really

hard. Some of these departments have a lot of pain to come, local gun

and, huge difficulty in meeting their social care requirements. --

local government. Justice, the Home Office, we have not heard much from

them, but they will be making very difficult decisions in the weeks

and. But at the same time, it seems as if the leader writers have

decided that it is the U-turn that is the big thing, if we look at the

front pages, which means, as you are saying, he comes across as a

reasonable man who listens to the public, a potential leader. I think

he has got the headlines he was hoping for four tomorrow's papers,

but I think the diagram and the headlines illustrate what sort of

Chancellor George Osborne is. A lot of his critics get him wrong and

Sadie is ideologically of. He is not, he is politically driven. --

and say he is ideologically driven. Some departments are big and still

growing, others have been slashed, and if he were an ideologically

driven Chancellor, he would have kept going on tax credits, saying,

you are just complaining and making apocalyptic predictions, as you did

in 2010. And he would have banked the 29 billion, had a bigger

surplus. If he continued to play to the image that a lot of people feel

that he exhibits, of a man who is ideologically driven, obsessed with

austerity, someone who has got to balance the books at whatever cost,

no matter how it might affect all mean to ordinary people at there.

You are saying that it is not who he is. I think that is misunderstanding

the Chancellor, he is a very strategic man, and the fact that he

not only announced he would protect police budget at the end of speech,

so that John McDonnell was scribbling away, and mending his

response seconds after the Chancellor had sat down, he a

political Chancellor, not some dry columnist who would like to sit in a

think tank. He thinks about the next move on the chessboard. My sense is

that he veers between the pragmatic Osborne that Isabel has been

describing and the pragmatic Osborne that Isabel has been describing Andy

Moore the wind in his sales, he thought he could move very hard on

tax credits. Now he is back in practical mode, and he has tempered

austerity, done a reversal on tax credits, thinking more

strategically. He goes between the two, he still has an element of

ideology, by targeting the surplus, which doesn't really make economic

sense. It makes some rhetorical sense, because most people think

that a government's budget is the same as a household budget, and if

you are not in balance, you are going to go bankrupt, which is not

true. It worked for Margaret Thatcher! To the Guardian, the 27

billion U-turn on the front, it talks about councils, Isabel, that

local councils are going to see their budgets, their central grant

cut drastically. They will have control over corporation tax, and

they can raise council tax by 2%, if it is used for social care, but they

are one of the big losers out of this. Absolutely, and this is where

we will see real opposition to this, not from the Labour Party, which I

am sure we will get onto, but from local governments and Conservatives

in local government included. Today a Conservative leader of the local

gun and association was stinging about the effect of these cuts on

local government. We talked about a black hole that they will not be

able to plug. -- the Local Government Association. He says they

will be in a great deal of trouble and that services that people rely

on are going to deteriorate. Now, again, the Tories might say, a lot

of these people gave dire warnings in 2010, but it is significant that

Conservative councils are criticising this Spending Review,

not putting on a show of unity, seriously worried about their

services. Conservative MPs that I talk to agree about this, they are

worried in a slightly cynical way that the people who vote will start

to notice the cuts to services, whereas they have been able to

sustain some of them because the cuts may have been born by people

who were disenfranchised already. Very briefly, the Financial Times,

Osborne swaps axe for taxes, he pivots to the centre, some have

suggested this is a tax and spend Spending Review and Autumn

Statement, is that how you see it? There is some element of truth in

it, a very slight, almost Gordon Brown stealth tax rise by Osborne,

saying, no, we will bind our hands going into the general, no income

tax, no VAT but a significant chunk of tax rises in the Budget after the

election. He has done it again, damp duty is going up for buy to let

people with second homes. There is going to be various cuts at

renewable energies games, company cars, lots of things like that. The

apprenticeships Levy, a big chunk of change will come from that, it will

hit companies, the OBR think it will be passed on to employees. The

non-tax-raising Chancellor pads up tax. Who would have thought you

could compare Gordon Brown and George Osborne? Staying with the

Financial Times, Isabel, the Labour response, John McDonnell's great

leap backwards, not the best of days, some would suggest in terms of

the Labour leadership and how it has responded to the Autumn Statement.

It is now much easier to compare Gordon Brown and George Osborne than

Gordon Brown and John McDonnell. It is very difficult for a Shadow

Chancellor to response to an economic statement, you have seconds

to decide what you are going to say, scribbling out a bit as the

Chancellor surprises you. John McDonnell has never done this

before, but all of that taken into account, his response to the

Spending Review was very bad today. Labour MPs were ashen faced to begin

with, because they don't want him to be Shadow Chancellor, but when he

produced Mao's little red book and started quoting from it before

handing it to George Osborne as a gift, he could have wrapped it up,

here is a little gift, you could see all of them sinking down into their

seats. Actually, journalists enjoy the stories, they are interesting

and fun, but there is something very sad about what is happening to the

Labour Party at the moment. You have hundreds of thousands of new members

who would save they are doing what we believe they should be doing. But

not what the electorate believes. Ben, very briefly, can Labour

recover? He needs to put the little red book away and start reading from

the basic book of politics. If you are going to make a high risk joke,

make sure it is funny expert well, we are laughing, but not many of the

Labour Party are, I am afraid. We will look at a few more stories in

an hour, many thanks for that. Stay with us on BBC News, much more

coming up, but now it is time for Sportsday.