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Hi, I'm Anouche and I'm Alphan. And on today's episode of The New Statement podcast,

we discuss the Spring Statement and you ask us, how did Labour respond?

So we're speaking just after the Chancellor Rishisunak has delivered his Spring Statement.

I was watching on the TV, Alvar, I think you were watching in Parliament. Could you tell us a bit

about what the sort of immediate reaction was from being there on the front line?

Before we start, apologies to you and the patient listeners. If it sounds like I'm under water,

which I know it sometimes starts from here, it's just because I'm hearing the Rishisunak statement.

I'm in Port Callis Highs and it is really quite busy, but this is quite a disorder I could find

in Parliament. So sorry about the probability. So I actually feel like with these things,

sometimes the immediate reaction is not necessarily a good gauge of how it's going to go.

It's so often with like previous projects, the big controversy doesn't really emerge until

the following day when people have had time to look at it. And I think that's maybe especially

the case with this, even though it wasn't a budget and it's a sort of smaller Spring Statement,

just because essentially Rishisunak and I was just quite confusing that there was this rhetoric

of low-tech things about tax cuts, basically. Finally, everything is a tax cut. All of the measures

he's taking to support people with the cost of living crisis and storing energy bills

were framed in terms of tax cuts. But then there are political reasons for that, which we can

...