Well, hello there. You are watching the press Preview. A first look at what is on the front pages. Time, then, to see what's making the headlines with the deputy editor of conservative home Henry Hill and the journalist and broadcaster Jenny Kleeman. Welcome to both of you. It's the pre Autumn Statement night, of course, isn't it? So let's see what's on those front pages. The eye looking ahead, certainly, to tomorrow's Autumn Statement, saying that the Chancellor will cut personal taxes, but expects interest rates to remain high until the year after next. The Guardian says Mr. Hunt has given in to party demands for tax cuts in a bid to revive the economy. The Times says his announcements will benefit workers and businesses. The Metro leading with the deaths of four teenage boys in North Wales in what it calls a tragedy on a lad's camping weekend. Well, the sun pictures all four boys in its front page with the headline So Young. That tragic story is also the lead for tomorrow's Daily Mail. And meantime, the Star tells us that punk rockers the Sex Pistols have declared themselves fans of Sircliffe Richard, even if the feeling may not be that mutual.

By scanning the QR code you'll see on screen during the program, you can check out the front pages of tomorrow's newspapers while you watch us. So let's head then to Henry Hill and Jenny Cleeman with our look ahead to the Autumn Statement. What do we know so far? Where do we start? Henry?

So the big sort of economic story is that Jeremy Hunt appears to be making full expensing permanent. Now this is a big business cut.

This is the Times, now, isn't it?

This is from the Times. Interestingly, it's a contradiction with The Guardian because The Guardian says he's only extending it for one year, but I think he's making it permanent effectively. That means that on qualifying investment in machinery, new technology and so on, businesses will be able to claim 100% of that expenditure against their corporation tax bill. That's been something that's been in demand for a while. It was introduced as a temporary measure during the pandemic, but the argument from sort of tax economists has been if you want to get the full benefits of full expensing, it needs to be permanent, because that's the only way it really actually changes how businesses invest, rather than simply moving existing investment around. Beyond that, we have apparently there's going to be a cut in national insurance. It doesn't quite say what the rate is going to be in The Times, but there is going to be a cut in national insurance, then there will also be increases in the national living wage and benefits and pensions. So clearly, kind of in the last six months, we've gone from everybody having on their most serious face to all of a sudden there's an election around the corner.

And so, good news, there's some fiscal headroom for giveaways and tax cuts. So obviously they'll be keeping at least one rabbit in the hat, hopefully to surprise us on the day. But that's the sort of overall headline.

And in terms of this giveaway, as it's been described, of nine to 10 billion pounds a year for business, the full expensing that you described, the Telegraph is reporting it as the biggest business tax cut in half a century. And in terms of the statements we're expecting to hear from jeremy hunt, there's been a few lines tonight from the treasury, and they say after COVID-19 and after the ukraine war and the energy issues mr huntsville telemps the conservatives will reject big government, high spending and high tax because we know that leads to less growth, not more. It's sort of trussenomics back in a way, isn't it, really, this push for growth. I'll come to you in a mean.

Well, certainly in its mean, the front page of The Guardian puts it very well. Hunt bows Tory demands for tax cuts, and this is going to make back ventures happy. We know that the Chancellor has this headroom at the moment, 25 to 30 billion pounds to play with. The question is, what is he going to do with it? And lions in this, we've supported families with rising bills, cut borrowing and halved inflation would suggest that they're in a really strong position at the moment, which.

Isn'T quite the case.

It's a sort of mixed picture borrowing for October being greater than predicted, even though borrowing from across the year is lower. So it's not quite the strong position, the ideal strong position that he would like to be in before giving these tax cuts away. But, yeah, the Guardian saying 110 measures are going to be announced tomorrow to boost Britain's stagnant economy.

Yes, indeed. So. And we have to remember why there is headroom. It's because wages have been going up, because inflation has been soaring and hitting hard thresholds of income tax, which gives the treasury more money, doesn't it? Apart from the debt interest, which obviously is very expensive for the government right now.

Oh, no, absolutely fiscal drag. The Conservatives really wanted to do the sort of a big thing for workers. They could index linked tax thresholds. This is one of the kind of index that means basically pegging income tax thresholds to inflation, which used to be the case in the distant past because currently it is the case, as you say, especially in periods of high inflation that people can be earning in real terms the same money or less money than they were a couple of years ago, but they'll have been dragged into a higher tax band. And all of this has to be weighed against that so called stealth tax. Now, it's interesting about the trust nomics thing, because it's got more a slightly meme quality to it, doesn't it? Because you can talk about low tax and small government, but taxes are still at historic highs, full expensing. If they do full expensing permanently, that is a really substantial shift in how we tax machinery.

You might buy investment in tech, for example.

Precisely. And the whole point of that, and the reason that it needs to be permanent, is that if you only the big companies that make really substantial investments, or could they operate on longer investment planning horizons than three years? So if you only have a temporary one, all that happens is those businesses will take investments that we're going to make two or three years down the line and they'll make them now. Whereas if you actually make it permanent, then they can start planning around it. So that's actually really substantial if he does it. But for the rest of it, the Tories, they did a graphic today or yesterday where they were like, it's either us or high taxes under kirstarmer. This is something the Tories did to great effect in the early 90s, but that worked in part because major had kept taxes low. Right. Whereas when taxes are already at historic highs, the idea of vote labor to get high taxes is just not quite as terrifying as maybe it would have been in different circumstances.

Sorry, as conservative home, do you support the reduction in taxes in whatever form they come?

I mean, I support taxes, I support tax cuts on a case by case basis. Full expensing is a great policy and if he makes full expensing permanent, that is probably the best economic policy decision this government has made in the course of this parliament. For sure. The rest of them cutting national insurance is nice for people, but on the other hand, how are you going to pay for things? Because he's increasing welfare. He's increasing pensions as well. Pensions would have been the obvious thing to try and get some savings out of, but they haven't done that. So this is the problem for low tax conservatives, is everyone's in favor of low taxes, but then you actually have to balance it by cutting some spending. And very few, they've got far fewer explanations for how they're going to cut the spending and that's obviously what undid. Liz Truss as well. She did all of these. Yeah, I sat there at the Tory Conference with people with a notebook trying to work it out, when she was like, we're going to do this many tax cuts. It's like, okay, let's see if we can get the savings.

Absolutely couldn't do it. And that's the problem Tories need to solve.

But we're not even talking about spending cuts, are we? We're talking about the need for spending in our National Health Service, for example, or to pay teachers properly, or nurses properly, or the doctors who are still on strike. All of these elements that still need more money.

Yes. I mean, we are in a crisis and this is even though income tax bands kept the same since 2021, and I don't know how much. It is sort of 25 billion pounds in tax yield extra because of fiscal drag. We have a problem there. I mean, what is interesting also to me today was the announcement that came today, the kind of early announcement about the increase in the minimum wage and also that 21 year olds will be eligible for it. And this is really going to make a difference to a very large number of people. But this is being dressed up as a way of getting people into work, a way of getting people off benefits and as sort of double whammy, even though this is going to cost the government quite a lot and will amount to a 2300 pound pay increase for the youngest people who will be eligible for this pay rise. They are able to kind of balance it somehow by saying we will not be paying them benefits elsewhere. But yeah, I mean, it's not like there's nothing for the government to be spending money on. We're in desperate times at the moment.

Yeah. Ten pounds 42 to eleven pounds 44. From April next year. Pre announced bank of England, though, forecasting a stagnant economy in 2024. The eye talks about the cut of personal taxes, but interest rates remain high until 2025. Presumably that's because inflation will have a tail on it, is that right? And it should be very slow to drop.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think also the bank is trying to expectation manage because we're not going back to how interest rates were. We had a historically unusual period of near zero interest rates post the financial, which lasted a long time. And that's not coming back is the impression that we get right, they may come down from their current highs, but we're not going back to that kind of very sort of zero point 25% or whatever it was for quite a long time. So that's why the bank is warning that. But also that leading back into what we were discussing about the need for more spending. That kind of captures the challenge facing any British government, Tory or Labor, which is that you have these huge demands for spending on the NHS, social care, teachers, public works and all the rest of it. And on the other hand, you do have a stagnant economy, but the more money you suck out of the economy to try and keep those revenue expenditures going, the harder it is to jumpstart growth. There is a tension there between the need to meet these expenditures in the here and now and try and stimulate a more dynamic economy.

And in terms of welfare, which is an enormous bill, obviously, for the treasury, the indication of a tighter approach to that, for example, those with mental health or mobility issues will be told to look for work that they could do from home. For example, even being asked questions of will you remove somebody's bus pass? There'll be squeezes on things in order to get people to do that. So I don't know how you feel about that.

Well, I mean, I don't feel very good about that. The idea of you're going to remove someone's bus parts to incentivize that was.

A question rather than an answer.

No, I mean, I think you have.

To make but free prescriptions and legal aid are things that could be cut off benefit claimants if they don't look for work.

I think that we need to be not having tax cuts if those are the things that are going to be happening in order to enable them. I understand that the government wants to look strong on benefits, but when we're cutting things to the bone to that extent, I don't think it's very but.

That is only I mean, as I understand the policy, it is only for people who active, who one are expected to look for work and then actively refuse to do it.

They are deemed fit to work, but do not look for employment. The statement I think, from Downey Street was people are over three times more likely to be written off work under the work capability assessment now than ten years ago. And I think that's the intention to address that.

The government has a lot of problems with the implementation of this. Stuff like that keeps happening. Whenever they introduce an exemption that's meant to be for a small minority, it ends up kind of ballooning. There are extra payments, for example. I can't remember the exact name, but there was a special cases payment that was supposed to go to sort of the people who needed it most. It ended up going to 80% of people who might plausibly be able to receive it. The problem with all of this stuff about fine tuning the benefit system is it costs money to do right. It's difficult to do. This kind of hard means testing. You need to have an awful lot of inspections. So the question is really, is it actually going to save money? If you consider the fact that you'll have to have more DWP staff, more inspections and everything else versus the number of claimants. Now, the treasury will have done the numbers and maybe that will balance out, but that's always the invisible cost of this kind of thing.

Okay, well, obviously full coverage of that 11:00. Our coverage starts about 1230. We're expecting him to get on his feet. A number of newspapers are sort of with a sort of lingering headline trying to work out what's happening in Tel Aviv, the Times, the Guardian, the Financial Times as well, with a picture there about this potential hostage deal. Jenny yes.

I mean, it's something that at last sounds like there could be positive news both for the hostages and for those who very much want a ceasefire in Gaza. This idea that there could be an exchange of hostages, of the Israeli hostages, ten or twelve a day for four days, up to 50 50 hostages in exchange for 150 Palestinian prisoners and a four day ceasefire. I mean, this ceasefire is for practical reasons. To get these hostages out will be very, very difficult. You can't have a war going on around them. These hostages will have been kept in very different places. They will be being looked after by militiamen, by different kind of criminal families underground. Gathering them will be difficult. This has to get through the Israeli parliament, which is why these headlines are kind of presented in this caveatted way, because this isn't a done deal yet, but there is a sense that this is going to happen. The US very much in favor of it happening. Something has to give. I mean, it's been six weeks now and there are 230 hostages, but it's thought that it's women and children on both sides that will be released.

Yes, certainly keeping an ear to the ground for any developments on that. Both of you stay there lots still to discuss, including looking at some of the failings identified in the investigation into the disappearance of Nicola Bully. You are watching the press preview with me once again, Henry Hill and Jenny Kieeman looking ahead to Wednesday's newspapers. And let's take a look at the case of Nicola Bully, shall we? It's inside the Metro and this is the examination into the police handling of it. This article suggesting that the behavior of a diving expert caused challenges to the investigation. So parts of the investigation criticized other parts, they say, like, for example, believing her body was in the water. And almost to the day, predicting when her body would be discovered was praised. But it's a bit difficult for police. Some of this.

It was a complete failure of communications. They lost control of communications and they also lost control of communications when it came to this diving expert, because they did not sufficiently say to him that he should not be talking to the media. And that's the tragedy of all of this. When you don't give the necessary bits of information and don't withhold necessary bits of information, that's when conspiracy theories start. That's when amateur sleuths start thinking, oh, what are they not telling us? And it resulted in an incredibly painful situation for the people who lived in that part of the world and also for Nicola Bully's family, who had to deal with people being suspicious of her partner. And then these personal disclosures, whilst not illegal, as this report today found, were completely unnecessary. We all knew at the time they were completely unnecessary. And it's your worst nightmare that you would go missing and personal details about your life and your medical history would be revealed. I really feel for her partner and her two daughters who had to go through all of this, and it was all totally avoidable. It was a really unedifying, awful time in January when she went missing, where all of this amateur sleuthing took place.

And it seems to be the case that all of this could have been avoided if they just thought better, thought in a more intelligent way about how to handle the messaging and all the.

Video bloggers who turned up and all of the amount of traffic it generated was really extraordinary, wasn't it? Should we go to the Times? The announcement today that Top Gear would be rested or laid to rest, as some suggest?

Henry yeah. So it's not being formally laid to rest, apparently. It's too big a brand to do.

That and still operating abroad.

Absolutely. And of course, it went into Abeyance before Jeremy Clarkson revived it once and maybe someone will do it again. But, yeah, they've announced that they're going to basically pause or put it on rest. It obviously Freddie Flinthoff had that horrifying accident in December where he had to end up being airlifted to hospital after. And it turns out he was basically doing something in absolutely freezing conditions in what looks like a terrifying car that I wouldn't go anywhere near. And so he's now obviously back at work, but he's got those injuries which everyone's seen, and so they've decided, effectively that out of respect to him, in part, they're going to pause the show. Now, that's obviously one reason. The other thing is that Dopkia has simply not been doing as well since the original team left. There were obviously the reasons that that happened, but the original presenting trio or Jamie Clarkson, they made it their own and they really made it into the cultural phenomenon that it was, at least in the UK. And they transferred all of that over to their next show when that was picked up by another producer. And it hasn't really managed to maintain the same niche since.

So you can see why the BBC, notwithstanding all of this, might still be like, okay, we haven't managed to keep the same thing going with a completely new team. Let's put it on the back burner for a bit and maybe come back with a fresh show in a few years time.

Okay.

It's interesting many people miss it. No think and, you know, respect to him and fear of liability issues, no doubt, Too is part of the play there. Both of you for the moment. Thank you very much indeed. Henry Hill. Jenny Cleeman for now. Thank you.