:00:00. > :00:00.the Manchester United game against PSV, and Man City against Juventus,
:00:00. > :00:00.and we meet the teenage weightlifting sensation after the
:00:00. > :00:13.Papers. Hello and welcome to our look
:00:14. > :00:16.ahead to what the the papers With me are Isabel Hardman,
:00:17. > :00:20.assistant editor at the Spectator, and Ben Chu, the Independent's
:00:21. > :00:24.economics editor. The FT says the government's deficit
:00:25. > :00:30.reduction strategy will now depend more on tax rises
:00:31. > :00:33.than on further cuts, as the public appetite
:00:34. > :00:37.for austerity wanes. The Metro echoes the famous
:00:38. > :00:40.declaration of Margaret Thatcher, as it headlines
:00:41. > :00:45.Mr Osborne's two policy reversals. The i has the same play
:00:46. > :00:51.on the Thatcher quote. The Guardian highlights the squeeze
:00:52. > :00:58.on local government, it says councils will see a near halving
:00:59. > :01:01.of their central government grant. The Express says the Chancellor's
:01:02. > :01:03.protection of foreign aid spending is
:01:04. > :01:15.a political gamble when taxes rise. The Telegraph says the U-turn on
:01:16. > :01:19.working tax credit marks the end of austerity. The Daily Mail would like
:01:20. > :01:24.to know, whatever happened to austerity? We will start with the
:01:25. > :01:30.Metro, the Tories are for turning, everyone expected a softening of the
:01:31. > :01:35.cuts to working tax credits, not that they would be completely
:01:36. > :01:40.scrapped, but he has completely scrapped them, surprised everybody.
:01:41. > :01:43.A smart move by the Chancellor, no-one and could pick over the
:01:44. > :01:47.details of the mitigation, saying that there is a problem here or
:01:48. > :01:51.there. Everyone was so surprised that he had managed to scrap those
:01:52. > :01:55.cuts entirely, so even though some people will still be affected by
:01:56. > :01:59.lower tax credit payments when they are rolled into universal credit, it
:02:00. > :02:03.became a good news story for him. And I think it rectified some of the
:02:04. > :02:08.damage that has been done to his reputation, to his character over
:02:09. > :02:12.the past few weeks, to have someone saying, I have listened to concerns
:02:13. > :02:16.and changed my mind is quite important in politics, particularly
:02:17. > :02:20.for George Osborne. He looks reasonable. He had carried on
:02:21. > :02:27.resisting those concerns for too long. The 27, 29 billion stuff down
:02:28. > :02:33.the back of the sofa, when would he have found out about that? In the
:02:34. > :02:38.weeks leading up to the statement. OK, in the weeks leading up to the
:02:39. > :02:43.statement, sober for the vote on working tax credits? I am not sure
:02:44. > :02:47.of the timing, but the Chancellor generally has good sign of what
:02:48. > :02:50.numbers are going into the Autumn Statement, not least because there
:02:51. > :02:55.is too and fro between the Treasury and the OBR about what will go into
:02:56. > :03:02.the document. You would not have thought before and? Not judging by
:03:03. > :03:07.the look on his face when he lost the vote! These headlines are about
:03:08. > :03:11.three quarters right, on tax credits, it is a big reversal, on
:03:12. > :03:17.public spending, the squeeze will be considerably less than was
:03:18. > :03:21.expected, but there is a lot of departments which are still having
:03:22. > :03:24.extremely large squeezes, and he will still get this 10 billion
:03:25. > :03:29.surplus at the end of the Parliament, and this is something
:03:30. > :03:35.that a lot of economists say is not necessary to get the public finances
:03:36. > :03:38.on an even keel. They think you only need a current budget surplus,
:03:39. > :03:43.excluding capital spending. I do not think we should take this too far
:03:44. > :03:48.and say austerity is over, but there will be a lot of public spending
:03:49. > :03:53.cuts to come. Let's go to your paper, do the numbers add up? A Venn
:03:54. > :03:57.diagram, some kind of diagram, like a wheel with lots of black bits and
:03:58. > :04:02.red bits, can we bring that up for the viewers to see? There it is.
:04:03. > :04:07.Now, I am going to let you explain this diagram, do the figures add up?
:04:08. > :04:12.Well, what you're looking at is a Catherine wheel of a income that is
:04:13. > :04:19.the best way to describe it. The red bars are cuts announced today, so
:04:20. > :04:23.very big for transport, justice, local government, Home Office. The
:04:24. > :04:28.protected departments, overseas aid, health, you can see the bars going
:04:29. > :04:32.up, and you can see the pain since 2010, since austerity started, so
:04:33. > :04:36.over the full decade you can see how big some of the cuts have been to
:04:37. > :04:41.places like transport, business, justice, getting on for 50%, perhaps
:04:42. > :04:45.even more. It is really trying to sum up the whole decade of
:04:46. > :04:48.austerity, if you like, you can see how uneven it has been, how some
:04:49. > :04:52.departments are fared relatively well, others have been hit really
:04:53. > :04:59.hard. Some of these departments have a lot of pain to come, local gun
:05:00. > :05:02.and, huge difficulty in meeting their social care requirements. --
:05:03. > :05:05.local government. Justice, the Home Office, we have not heard much from
:05:06. > :05:10.them, but they will be making very difficult decisions in the weeks
:05:11. > :05:14.and. But at the same time, it seems as if the leader writers have
:05:15. > :05:18.decided that it is the U-turn that is the big thing, if we look at the
:05:19. > :05:23.front pages, which means, as you are saying, he comes across as a
:05:24. > :05:32.reasonable man who listens to the public, a potential leader. I think
:05:33. > :05:35.he has got the headlines he was hoping for four tomorrow's papers,
:05:36. > :05:37.but I think the diagram and the headlines illustrate what sort of
:05:38. > :05:40.Chancellor George Osborne is. A lot of his critics get him wrong and
:05:41. > :05:48.Sadie is ideologically of. He is not, he is politically driven. --
:05:49. > :05:53.and say he is ideologically driven. Some departments are big and still
:05:54. > :05:57.growing, others have been slashed, and if he were an ideologically
:05:58. > :06:02.driven Chancellor, he would have kept going on tax credits, saying,
:06:03. > :06:07.you are just complaining and making apocalyptic predictions, as you did
:06:08. > :06:12.in 2010. And he would have banked the 29 billion, had a bigger
:06:13. > :06:18.surplus. If he continued to play to the image that a lot of people feel
:06:19. > :06:22.that he exhibits, of a man who is ideologically driven, obsessed with
:06:23. > :06:26.austerity, someone who has got to balance the books at whatever cost,
:06:27. > :06:31.no matter how it might affect all mean to ordinary people at there.
:06:32. > :06:36.You are saying that it is not who he is. I think that is misunderstanding
:06:37. > :06:40.the Chancellor, he is a very strategic man, and the fact that he
:06:41. > :06:44.not only announced he would protect police budget at the end of speech,
:06:45. > :06:48.so that John McDonnell was scribbling away, and mending his
:06:49. > :06:52.response seconds after the Chancellor had sat down, he a
:06:53. > :06:56.political Chancellor, not some dry columnist who would like to sit in a
:06:57. > :07:01.think tank. He thinks about the next move on the chessboard. My sense is
:07:02. > :07:04.that he veers between the pragmatic Osborne that Isabel has been
:07:05. > :07:12.describing and the pragmatic Osborne that Isabel has been describing Andy
:07:13. > :07:22.Moore the wind in his sales, he thought he could move very hard on
:07:23. > :07:27.tax credits. Now he is back in practical mode, and he has tempered
:07:28. > :07:32.austerity, done a reversal on tax credits, thinking more
:07:33. > :07:36.strategically. He goes between the two, he still has an element of
:07:37. > :07:40.ideology, by targeting the surplus, which doesn't really make economic
:07:41. > :07:44.sense. It makes some rhetorical sense, because most people think
:07:45. > :07:48.that a government's budget is the same as a household budget, and if
:07:49. > :07:51.you are not in balance, you are going to go bankrupt, which is not
:07:52. > :07:58.true. It worked for Margaret Thatcher! To the Guardian, the 27
:07:59. > :08:04.billion U-turn on the front, it talks about councils, Isabel, that
:08:05. > :08:11.local councils are going to see their budgets, their central grant
:08:12. > :08:16.cut drastically. They will have control over corporation tax, and
:08:17. > :08:21.they can raise council tax by 2%, if it is used for social care, but they
:08:22. > :08:26.are one of the big losers out of this. Absolutely, and this is where
:08:27. > :08:30.we will see real opposition to this, not from the Labour Party, which I
:08:31. > :08:34.am sure we will get onto, but from local governments and Conservatives
:08:35. > :08:37.in local government included. Today a Conservative leader of the local
:08:38. > :08:43.gun and association was stinging about the effect of these cuts on
:08:44. > :08:47.local government. We talked about a black hole that they will not be
:08:48. > :08:52.able to plug. -- the Local Government Association. He says they
:08:53. > :08:56.will be in a great deal of trouble and that services that people rely
:08:57. > :09:01.on are going to deteriorate. Now, again, the Tories might say, a lot
:09:02. > :09:05.of these people gave dire warnings in 2010, but it is significant that
:09:06. > :09:09.Conservative councils are criticising this Spending Review,
:09:10. > :09:13.not putting on a show of unity, seriously worried about their
:09:14. > :09:16.services. Conservative MPs that I talk to agree about this, they are
:09:17. > :09:21.worried in a slightly cynical way that the people who vote will start
:09:22. > :09:24.to notice the cuts to services, whereas they have been able to
:09:25. > :09:29.sustain some of them because the cuts may have been born by people
:09:30. > :09:34.who were disenfranchised already. Very briefly, the Financial Times,
:09:35. > :09:40.Osborne swaps axe for taxes, he pivots to the centre, some have
:09:41. > :09:44.suggested this is a tax and spend Spending Review and Autumn
:09:45. > :09:49.Statement, is that how you see it? There is some element of truth in
:09:50. > :09:54.it, a very slight, almost Gordon Brown stealth tax rise by Osborne,
:09:55. > :10:01.saying, no, we will bind our hands going into the general, no income
:10:02. > :10:06.tax, no VAT but a significant chunk of tax rises in the Budget after the
:10:07. > :10:09.election. He has done it again, damp duty is going up for buy to let
:10:10. > :10:16.people with second homes. There is going to be various cuts at
:10:17. > :10:19.renewable energies games, company cars, lots of things like that. The
:10:20. > :10:25.apprenticeships Levy, a big chunk of change will come from that, it will
:10:26. > :10:30.hit companies, the OBR think it will be passed on to employees. The
:10:31. > :10:34.non-tax-raising Chancellor pads up tax. Who would have thought you
:10:35. > :10:40.could compare Gordon Brown and George Osborne? Staying with the
:10:41. > :10:44.Financial Times, Isabel, the Labour response, John McDonnell's great
:10:45. > :10:48.leap backwards, not the best of days, some would suggest in terms of
:10:49. > :10:51.the Labour leadership and how it has responded to the Autumn Statement.
:10:52. > :10:57.It is now much easier to compare Gordon Brown and George Osborne than
:10:58. > :11:01.Gordon Brown and John McDonnell. It is very difficult for a Shadow
:11:02. > :11:05.Chancellor to response to an economic statement, you have seconds
:11:06. > :11:08.to decide what you are going to say, scribbling out a bit as the
:11:09. > :11:12.Chancellor surprises you. John McDonnell has never done this
:11:13. > :11:17.before, but all of that taken into account, his response to the
:11:18. > :11:21.Spending Review was very bad today. Labour MPs were ashen faced to begin
:11:22. > :11:26.with, because they don't want him to be Shadow Chancellor, but when he
:11:27. > :11:30.produced Mao's little red book and started quoting from it before
:11:31. > :11:34.handing it to George Osborne as a gift, he could have wrapped it up,
:11:35. > :11:39.here is a little gift, you could see all of them sinking down into their
:11:40. > :11:42.seats. Actually, journalists enjoy the stories, they are interesting
:11:43. > :11:46.and fun, but there is something very sad about what is happening to the
:11:47. > :11:50.Labour Party at the moment. You have hundreds of thousands of new members
:11:51. > :11:56.who would save they are doing what we believe they should be doing. But
:11:57. > :12:02.not what the electorate believes. Ben, very briefly, can Labour
:12:03. > :12:05.recover? He needs to put the little red book away and start reading from
:12:06. > :12:10.the basic book of politics. If you are going to make a high risk joke,
:12:11. > :12:15.make sure it is funny expert well, we are laughing, but not many of the
:12:16. > :12:19.Labour Party are, I am afraid. We will look at a few more stories in
:12:20. > :12:23.an hour, many thanks for that. Stay with us on BBC News, much more
:12:24. > :12:28.coming up, but now it is time for Sportsday.