Keir Starmer 'USING' Rachel Reeves to deflect from unpopularity as Autumn Budget leaks GROW

I mean, everyone watching at home, you would have just seen the litany, the litany of budget leaks we've just had on top of the, well, the disastrous amount we've seen over the last, I would say it's been like almost three months now, Paul. Where should we start? Which demon glue front page do you want to go with best? This is a bit of a tambola now, isn't it? Because I don't actually think any of us know. I'm starting to wonder if Rachel Reeves knows what she's going to do on Wednesday. I mean, I'm starting to feel for her a little bit. Are you? I'm not. I mean, this is like literally your own making, isn't it? This is like literally your own... Well, is it? I mean, I think she's a pawn for Starmer. I think she's being well and truly used to deflect from his poor leadership. Look, she's part of it as well. I don't feel that sorry for her. But I'm starting to wonder if we should actually ever pre-set dates in the future for budgets, because what's happened... I've never seen anything quite like this. Maybe you have, Linda, I don't know. But I'm just trying to think back 20, 30 years I've been interested in politics. I've never seen a budget which has had so many things floated and you turned on without us ever really knowing if they were going to be used in the first place or not. As if they don't know. As if they're saying, we've got to do something here. What is it we can do? What's least... What's most popular? What's least unpopular? It's leaking to road test concepts and thoughts. Yeah, pitch rolling they call it, don't they? I tell you what, that's exactly right, pitch rolling. But Peter Madison had a really good expression once for leaks. He said in the House of Parliament, it wasn't just so much leaks as continual seepage. That is what's happened here. It's a leaky bucket government, isn't it? That's right. It's a leaky bucket. I mean, I think it's a deliberately leaky bucket of a government, because I don't think they know what they want. I don't think they know what their MPs will want. They're desperate to stave off some kind of, you know, backbench rebellion. They're desperate to win back people in the polls. This is the problem, Paul, isn't it? And I'm talking to that Paul over there, Labour Paul. I'm going to have to differentiate between Paul and Paul. Give me a nickname. Yeah, Paul Funny Paul. I could go wrong, actually, later this show gets, couldn't I? Labour Paul. This is a disaster, is it? It's a disaster. I mean, we shouldn't be having this many leaks, first of all. The Chancellor's now more unpopular than Kwasi Kwasi when he had the mini-budget. We are looking at this kind of level now, aren't we? I mean, I think it's partly because the OBR has to do its sort of forecasting and more people are now involved in the process than they used to be. It used to be the Chancellor and like a small huddle of advisers. So if a leak came out, you knew either it was somebody off the rails or it was a deliberate kite flying exercise of the kind that Linda was describing. But this is all out of control now, because too many people have got a sight of some aspect of it and they want to talk big in the red line or whatever else. Some of it's deliberate, too, which I think, as I said earlier, I'm against. There's a great book by Damien McBride, who was Gordon Brown's spinner, called Power Trip. And he describes in there the process of giving a tiny sniff of a budget to one journalist and then a different sniff to another journalist, keeping eight or nine different lobby journalists all happy because they've all got something they can try. And they'll all go back to their editors and say, I've got the inside scoop. But nothing on this industrial scale of chaos that we've seen over the last few weeks. You can't fiddle while Rome burns. Which is why I'm saying we need to go back to Purdue, where we just stay shtum on the whole thing until it's announced. All of these headlines are speculations. You know, they express as 800 quid. That's just a made up number plucked out of the air. There's no evidence for that. The thing about students. Well, that might be true, but we'll see. We just don't know till Wednesday. But you know, you've got you've got this mess, but actually it's all underpinned by the fact that Starmer won this election by kind of not really being Labour. Now he's in power and his backbenchers are expecting him to act like a Labour prime minister, and he is not. He is caught between. But you know, we'll just say put income tax up. You know, that's not a Labour solution. But that's mine, that's what I want him to do. Actually, one of our viewers here has made a really good point. It's Starkey Rippon has said the starting point should be simple. Reeves promised the last tax rise was the last one. Yet all the kite flying means we're now debating which hike hurts least, not whether there should be any at all. We've let Labour shift the whole conversation into their turf. Now we're walking straight into their hands. Very, very well said, because this is it, Paul, isn't it? Because at the end of the day, because of all this kite flying, we're all going, which one's going to hurt me the least? I would rather not have an income tax hike, personally, because I think we need to incentivise people to work in this country. How do you feel about the mansion tax? What about putting, you know, a few extra if you've got a house with tax on their houses? But if you've got a five million pound house. What we need, Labour Paul, is actually for the Labour parties to get a grip and say, actually, spending in this government is out of control. Spending in the previous government was out of control. And what the public actually wants is a tax cutting government. That is always the battle to win when it comes to winning votes. Well, we're just talking about David Cameron just then, weren't we? Don't forget that the Cameron government had the austerity, had all those cuts to public services, like taking the police off the streets. And it ends up costing you more down the line. That's the problem. You cut short start, you take cops off the street, you get crime going up and you get young people without jobs. Well, no one has suggested that either government has covered themselves in glory for a very, very long time here. Having the argument from the conventional perspective that this is Conservative versus Labour is no longer really of any value whatsoever, because most people, all of us on here would suggest that actually we've probably had 15 to 20 years worth of problematic governments irrespective of what colour they are. What was very interesting, I found, is that Starmer, you know, was the first person to say it's now country before party. This is all party before country. That's right. One hundred percent. Because otherwise you would make the difficult decisions and your backbenchers would have to stay shtum. Hello, I'm Bev Turner. Now, it can feel like the money in our bank accounts at the moment does not keep up with the cost of living and maybe there's a solution. I'm here today with the CEO of Tally Money, Cameron Parry. Cameron, what is Tally Money? Well, Bev, with Tally Money, you get a current account and a debit card. But instead of pounds, you use milligrams of gold as your everyday money. So why gold? Gold traditionally is a great store of value. It has, on average, gone up at over 11 percent per annum for the last 25 years against the pound. It's tripled in value in the last decade. And in the last two years alone, it's increased by 50 percent against the pound. Banks' savings products just can't compete with that level of growth. But this isn't just about gold. This is about a currency that you guys have created at Tally Money. Explain it to me as though I'm an idiot. So, look, people need to be able to hold their earnings and build their savings in a money that retains its value and remains in their legal control and remains theirs to access away from government control. Great. You had me at not exposed to government control. You should feel safe and happy with your money. You should have peace of mind. The more money you see in your bank balance. And that's the type of thing we're trying to deliver and give people choice in the type of money they get to use every day. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Cameron. Thank you, Paul Cox. What would you like to talk about from the front pages of the newspapers? Please don't say Shirley Ballas choking on a fishbone. I have no interest in that. I mean, what I should say, I guess, is I'm glad she's OK. But that is about as much that as much thinking as I'm going to give to that story. Look, there are two stories now in the UK. There's two stories. There's there's one story across the world. It's UK and Russia, Ukraine, Russia, not UK, Russia, God forbid. And and not Shirley Ballas, but the but the but the budget. Now we've covered both extensively. I don't know if you want. I don't know if you want with your panel to talk a little bit more about Ukraine. But I think we should probably start on on the UK budget. This is going to be huge. I don't know. Good evening, by the way, Bob and Victoria. It's lovely to see you again. The light of my Sunday. So good to see you, Paul. Thank you, Victoria. So what I would say is that this is this is genuinely huge. This isn't hyperbolic from myself or GB News or Bev or whatever. That the budget this week is kind of make or break for the country. We're in a position where this country is on its knees economically. It's on its knees economically. I think this is my personal opinion. It's because Labour do not know how to manage the economy. All they know how to do is look after the welfare state. And right now, looking after the welfare state is just not possible. The reason we can't look after the welfare state is our welfare state is open to the rest of the world. So anyone who comes in can have access to it. So we're essentially paying for the rest of the world. That's why it's so expensive. That's why the NHS is on its knees. That's why the economy is floundering. What we need is strong leadership, strong leadership on the economy that sees growth. The only way you can have growth is to cut taxes, cut the welfare, cut your cloth accordingly, invest in business, encourage business leaders to stay. Don't have the politics of envy where anybody who's being successful is punished in some way and don't punish the working people. Make them want to work. Nobody in this country now feels that if they work hard, they are going to see the benefits for themselves or their families. We have a huge issue in the UK, and I know across the world, the US included, there are economic pressures. But the UK is in a particularly devastating state, Bev. Yeah, can I ask Paul a question? But are you subsidising the billionaires in your country with three trillion dollars of tax cuts and stealing from the poor, stealing the programs from the poor, the health, the housing, the food in order to give it to them? I don't think you're doing that. So the budget question is also one of fairness. And when you, by the way, have 800 pounds that you're losing in pensions, we have the same issue. It's actually two thousand dollars, which is what? Maybe I don't know, thirteen, fourteen hundred pounds that that you are. We are giving to the rich instead of letting the poor have their subsidies for health care so they can not have 50,000 a year die. So, you know, there's a whole different set of issues that relate to fairness that you have to take into account when you're talking about budget. Well, Victoria. Sorry, go on, Victoria. Oh, go on. Oh, yeah. You know, happy to chime in here. I think that actually the UK can take a little bit of a leaf out of the US's book in terms of actually having your parliament, you know, have hearings on what can actually be done to cut expenses. This is something that President Trump and his allies in Congress have been looking at extensively over the last few months. They have uncovered so much waste, fraud and abuse. Just this week, I wrote up a story about how almost half a billion dollars went through snap dollars to McDonald's and other fast food chains. This is something that was uncovered by Iowa Senator Joni Ernst. You know, as much as Trump loves McDonald's, I don't think the U.S. taxpayer should be subsidizing unhealthy food, particularly with a program that should be supplemental and nutritional. And so, you know, I'm sure that there are many more cases like that. I've uncovered also, again, through working with Joni Ernst's office and seeing some of the great work that they do. We've been paying for government funded mascots for national parks, for example. This is the kind of stuff that the U.S. taxpayer should not be paying for. And I'm sure that the UK taxpayer, if actually the budget was properly looked at and, you know, kind of uncovered through hearings in parliament, I'm sure that there are many similar cuts that could be done in the UK. Before we start policing the kind of food that we're going to tell the poor to eat because we don't consider it nutritious enough and McDonald's is a staple in the United States, I think we ought to at least give them enough money to eat. That's the point in the budget. Bob, I mean, hang on a minute. Just sorry. Go on, Paul. I just I was just processing that what what Bob was saying that. So you think you should be giving people poor people when you've had you've got your snap benefits, giving poor people money to spend on McDonald's? Or would you rather do what is happening here, which is that certain benefits can it can no longer be spent on junk food, but only on healthy food? That's got to be the right way to go. Bob, surely better, but not if it's if it's going to stop them from being able to eat. And there's an emergency that their funds are being stopped. You're never going to have time to decide what is and isn't healthy food in time to restore the SNAP benefits. And what Trump did was inexcusable. He just stopped the SNAP benefits. And finally, in the deal that was struck in Congress, they had to restore them. OK.