Good morning. Eight years of growth in living standards will be wiped out by 2024. Unemployment may rise by half a million. And Britain is in recession. Those were the stark takeaways from the Office for Budget Responsibility’s assessment of the public finances yesterday – and in his autumn statement, Jeremy Hunt did everything he could to spread the blame around the world. “There is a global energy crisis, a global inflation crisis and a global economic crisis,” he said. “There may be a recession made in Russia, but there is a recovery made in Britain.”
Labour weren’t having any of it – and you might expect that the public will be receptive to their critique of the government’s record. So what does that critique look like – and are voters ready to hear an alternative? For today’s newsletter, I spoke to political pollster Joe Twyman about how public opinion will shape the fight over the public finances that is likely to define the next couple of years in politics. Here are the headlines.
