Today, Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced a series of cuts to spending in order to address what she called a £22 bn ‘black hole’ in public finances. To discuss the government’s plans, Adam is joined by Chris - fresh from the chancellor’s press conference - and Faisal to discuss the chancellor’s announcements, how the claims have been calculated and the response from the opposition benches. You can join our Newscast online community here: https://tinyurl.com/newscastcommunityhere Newscast brings you daily analysis of the latest political news stories from the BBC. It was presented by Adam Fleming. It was made by Miranda Slade with Sam McLaren. The technical producer was Mike Regaard. The assistant editor is Chris Gray. The senior news editor is Sam Bonham.
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Hello.
I trust you've been glued to the Olympics, which is providing all the drama you would expect.
But the drama I was glued to on the tv today and for which the BBC had full rights, was Rachel Reeves, the new chancellor, versus Jeremy Hunt, the old chancellor in the House of Commons.
And what Rachel Reeves was doing was unveiling this audit she'd commissioned from the treasury about actually the state of how much the government was spending this year.
And she was claiming that the bills for government spending had gone up by a lot and in a way that the previous government had not been honest with the public about.
She basically said, there's a black hole in the government's accounts this year that amounts to about 22 billion pounds.
Sounds pretty simple.
Well, no, because then Jeremy Hunt fired back with his speech and he picked quite a lot of holes in her black hole.
So now there's a massive political argument about who's responsible for the black hole.
And it does seem that it's partly the previous government responsible for some of it, partly just circumstances like inflation being higher than anyone expected a few years ago when government budgets were set.
Oh, and the war in Ukraine.
Oh, and then also some decisions made today on public sector pay by this government.
Yeah, I know.
We will discuss what that all means eventually with Chris Mason, but straight away on this episode of newscast with BBC economics editor Faisal Islam.
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The exit poll is predicting a labour landslide.
We did it.
And before you know it, you have.