16/03/2016 The Papers

the winner gallops back to greatness at Cheltenham three years after a

heart problem threatened to end his racing days. That's all in Sportsday

in 15 minutes, after the papers. Hello and welcome to our look ahead

to what the papers will be bringing With me are Isabel Hardman,

assistant editor of the Spectator, and Ben Chu, economics editor

of the Independent. Tomorrow's front pages, the FT says

that George Osborne attempted to sweeten bleak economic news

in a "safety-first" Budget. Osborne

sugars the pill is the Daily Telegraph's take, as it reports that

Britain will become one of the first

countries in the world to introduce a sugar tax on soft drinks.

The Independent says that

the tax did not hide the ?55 billion hole

in the public finances. The i reports that Jeremy Corbyn lashed

out at "six years of failures and unfairness

in his Budget response. A sweet and sour Budget

is Metro's verdict. The Daily Express says there was

outrage from Brexit campaigners over what it

calls a pro-EU Budget. The sugar tax formed part

of a budget that raided big business to fund giveaways

for middle-class workers and savers, the Daily Mail calls the budget

George's Awesome Gamble. This is the eye-catching

announcement of the Budget. It is a controversial measure but it is

clearly what he wanted to be on the front pages because it knocks off

some of the more sour bits of news which were in the Budget today. It

is also another way for him to suggest he has a kind of moral

mission as a politician, he wants to help the next generation and look

his children's generation in the eye. And the Sun don't seem

massively keen on it in their coverage. I do like their front

page, not necessarily because I agree with their criticism of the

sugar tax but they have the metaphor right. A lot of papers are saying a

spoonful of sugar from the Chancellor, when actually he is

taking away the sugar, which is what they eat mean with their mockup of

Dizzee Rascal. They have captured the essence of what he tried to do

well although they disagree with it. This will raise about ?500 million a

year at its peak, according to the Treasury's forecasters. It is not

that material in the scheme of things, in the scheme of these big

deficits which have opened up as a result of these latest forecasts and

yet all the papers are leading with it so quite a good result for the

Chancellor in that respect. People say it has been tried elsewhere and

hasn't worked. It is interesting because it was introduced in Mexico

and campaigners on both is sides save either didn't or did work and

there seemed to be all sorts of bits of evidence that support their

thesis. I suppose it is one of those things that if it works it is a good

thing, I am slightly ambivalent towards it if it works. But it

depends what it means by worked, it won't solve childhood obesity. You

can't test whether it works in reducing childhood obesity for some

time in the future. And it is not the only fact. -- factor. The

question of what the consumption of sugar would have been in the absence

of this tax is difficult to prove one way or another. That is why you

get these disagreements about what is happening in Mexico. Moving on to

the Daily Mail's coverage, again we have the Chancellor dressed up as

Dizzee Rascal on the Sun, I'm not sure who he is dressed as here. Is

that some film reference we have missed out on? He is sort of wearing

a dark bowtie and a velvet looking jacket and is obviously in a casino,

he has put his chips on... Well, he has his chips ready to play. They

seem to like the Budget, the Daily Mail, they say it is great for

Middle England, helping savers, small businesses. The big issue for

them is taking people out of the 40p rate of tax they have been

campaigning for but what they want to draw attention to is the

optimistic looking sons, which is an interesting line for the Daily Mail

to take given it doesn't really play into any of their big concerns --

interesting looking sums. They are right in the sense that the surplus

which the Chancellor now has pencilled in for 2019/20 which is

what he needs to meet his very, very inflexible fiscal mandate is only

achieved I unspecified spending cuts and a bit of jiggery-pokery at the

accountancy when he measures tax. And if the economy deteriorates a

bit further, which it might well do, that could be blown away further.

They are right that it is optimistic to believe he will necessarily get

that surplus at the end of the decade. I thought the strangest

thing about the Budget was that having talked about how terrible it

was going to be and how many cuts he was going to make, he referred to

them in a single paragraph, saying I have asked my colleagues to find

?3.5 billion. Why would he not set out the detail? Perhaps he hopes he

will never have to make those cuts and by the next Budget the money

which has been found in the back of the sofa will have changed again.

?3.5 billion is a significant sum, and it is from departments that have

had to cut significantly already, presumably when you start cutting

you do the easy bits and it gets harder and harder as you go on. And

people start briefing against you, which if you are George Osborne and

want to be Conservative leader is not convenient. It is really the

worst of all Treasury fudges, it will come from an efficiency review

which won't report until 2018 so really kicked into the long grass.

And no one believes these are efficiency savings, they are the

fallback of chancellors who are in a tight spot. They pluck them out of

the air and hope that people don't notice it. But they have noticed it,

and it is one of the reasons that the Daily Mail thinks it is a

gamble. And the Daily Mail doesn't like the sugar tax either, swingeing

suggests they are not keen. Getting into the politics of the Budget

speech, the element where George Osborne referred to the Office of

Budget Responsibility and what it said about EU membership. This was a

very risky passage in his speech. He quoted the Office of Budget

Responsibility Orr said he was quoting their warnings about the

uncertainty and damage to the economy that leaving the EU would

cause -- or said. They said they did want to make a judgement on this,

and actually it seems that George Osborne had actually overeat their

analysis of Brexit. To link the Budget with the EU referendum in

anyway was always going to be difficult because of the number of

Conservative back benches who are campaigning to leave but to do it in

what the Express and the Telegraph are at furious about the pro- EU

Budget. It is quite a dangerous game he is playing given that he doesn't

really want the Conservative Party to split over Europe, and also

doesn't want to cause Tory backbenchers to dislike him either,

because he is trying to woo them at the same time. And puzzling as well

because clearly he will have known that they will have gone through the

full text and worked out whether he is being entirely honest. It is hard

to know what his calculation is because often he will put things in

a speech knowing that the sympathetic press will make a speech

knowing that the sympathetic press will was never going to happen with

something like OBR warning about Brexit because so much of the press

is pro- Brexit Orleans very heavily to that sceptical case. It was

always likely that they were going to do dig into it and rubbish it and

that is what they have done. Ordinary people don't listen to the

full Budget speech, they either get a little clip on the news or they

get it through the papers. So it is hard to see what... How he could

have thought that it would do anything but just antagonise people

and antagonise the media by doing what he did, which was spinning it

quite misleadingly. My understanding is they made reference to the

short-term uncertainty that Brexit would cause but won't taking a view

on the longer term. No, they certainly won't recommending one

position or another -- they certainly won't recommending. They

think their party is getting very upset about their members

campaigning quite vigorously to keep written in the EU because David

Cameron and ministers think it is the best way. There is a frustration

that Conservative MPs would get that annoyed, that actually the

government would try to campaign properly rather than being

lacklustre and saying you can take it or leave it. Of course they are

going to campaign hard, these ministers say but you can understand

why George Osborne would want to be a bit careful. Take us to the front

of the Guardian. Not the main coverage where Osborne's credibility

gap is their big headline but the other story. Magical thinking was

the same, but the audience failed to suspend disbelief, I think

reflecting a lot of the coverage of an reaction to the Budget speech in

the sense that some of the Magic has worn off George Osborne. Interesting

looking at the Daily Mail earlier, this time last year, or a bit later,

in the post election emergency Budget, post- election Budget that

you had, he got some fantastic coverage not least from the Daily

Mail saying that he had slain the Dragon of the left. A very different

message as we have just seen today, taking a big gamble, and I think

that is reflected in a lot of coverage. The chancellor who

destroyed the political scene like a colossus only a year ago now seems a

much more diminished figure, a lot more... A lot of it is because of

Brexit, because people don't like the stance he has taken in the

media. A lot of it is because the shine has come off the economy and

there are all these storm clouds, and perhaps he has not done such a

fantastic job on that front. And then there was the tax credit

debacle. All these add together to make his political stock not as high

as it was relatively recently. Now is not the worst time for him to be

encountering some scepticism given the leadership contest isn't

tomorrow. It is much better for him to have the opportunity to counter

the worries that Conservative MPs really do have about him. Boris

Johnson is almost in a worse position because he still has to

prove himself in a serious government job and that is the worry

that MPs have about him. He has much less time in which to do that.

George Osborne knows what his weaknesses are and you can see him

trying to do that in his Budget on social justice, education reform,

trying to attack his critics who say he is being unfair to people on

disability benefits. He knows what his weaknesses and he has time to

try and address them. And it went through the Budget like a rock, this

next generation. He was talking about the sugar tax as very much

young children's obesity crisis, and it kept coming up coming up. To be

honest I'm not sure the reality matches with the rhetoric. We were

just talking earlier about the things he is doing on housing

which... The demand side, increasing the ability of people to get

mortgages and houses, unless you will have a complete revolution on

the supply side by building more of the things, anything you do on the

demand side will push up prices, which will hurt young people the

most. There are many other elements like that which don't match up, it

will be interesting to see how this message about caring about the Next

Generation really cuts through. He does push much harder in government

to get homes built than many of his colleagues, but it is really

difficult when you have lots of Conservative councils and members

who are very opposed to further housebuilding, to be able to do

that. Because you don't want to upset the people living in your

local parish who are not going to want it next door to them. Taking us

finally to the FT, not so much their main coverage but a sketch. It is a

wonderful sketch about George Osborne saying the word oops in his

Budget and admitting things haven't worked out as intended over the last

few months. He defines oops over an entire paragraph in George

Osborne's speech. The paragraph includes the word paradoxical. This

combination of our revision to nominal GDP produced by global

inflation have produced this paradoxical result. What he means by

that is oops, but he also means he is not going to hit one of his main

targets which is to have debt falling as a share of GDP in the

year 2015/16 which is a bit of a oops in other ways because why is it

so important in that single year to have debt falling by a fractional

amount? And this is one of the criticisms that many economists have

a of it, which is why did you hem yourself in like that? Why it be so

economically rigid? On the word oops we are going to draw things to a

close. Thank you to our guests. Coming up next it is time for