YouSaid · the spoken record

George Osborne

lines on the record: 71
first: 2023-05-15
most recent: 2023-05-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The prize is there to be won if you can get your message across in a compelling way. I think, and look, I would say, and there's a bit unfair on kind of current government ministers who didn't have the opportunity to be in opposition. But I think it does make you a very, I'm not sure a better minister, but it certainly equips you. You know, by the time I become chancellor, I had had five years to think about what I was going to do a job.”
2023-05-15 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 18: George Osborne: Austerity, Boris Johnson, and the UK's next Prime Minister · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many years as sort of junior shadow posts with various conservative leaders all sort of struggling and failing to make an impact against Tony Blair. And that period of 2005 to 2010, with my good friend, still my good friend David Cameron, we put together a different kind of conservative opposition, built our case for the country, and then won the election or got ourselves into a position where we ended up in Downing Street was incredibly hard work, but so rewarding. And I have the sort of fondest memories of that period. And I think I kind of, I can see in the labor opposition, I don't actually think we can come on and talk about this a bit, that they'ren't necessarily in quite as good a position as either we were or let alone the kind of Blair Brown opposition in the 90s. But, you know, that kind of tension and excitement and nervousness that you're going to screw it all up.”
2023-05-15 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 18: George Osborne: Austerity, Boris Johnson, and the UK's next Prime Minister · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I spent the half of my political career in opposition. It was in some ways the most sort of challenging and rewarding period. And I know that sounds kind of odd because, you know, obviously the job of being chance of the exchequer is comes with enormous responsibilities, incredibly intense job. But the job of being shadow chancellor is unbelievably difficult. Because when you, you know, if you're Chancellor and you decide not to get out of bed that day, the Treasury purs on as a kind of machine and the government carries on. And it's a bit like eventually the country would notice that all the politicians were still in bed. It'd be a bit like a kind of plane on autopilot that would eventually kind of crash into the mountain. But in opposition, if you don't do something that day, if you don't get out of bed and say, right, what am I going to do to make an impact today so that people notice we're around, we've got something to say, then nothing happens. And I...”
2023-05-15 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 18: George Osborne: Austerity, Boris Johnson, and the UK's next Prime Minister · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As you did back in the day. But because we were telling people essentially a truth, that the public were not stupid. They knew it to be the truth.”
2023-05-15 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 18: George Osborne: Austerity, Boris Johnson, and the UK's next Prime Minister · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He said before the 2010 election you were working in Downing Street at the time that the cuts coming would be bigger than those under Margaret Fetcher. Gordon Brown went apoplectic and told him to shut up. But he was telling the truth. Peter Mandel said it was the Deputy Prime Minister at the time was telling Gordon Brown he had to tell people there were cuts coming. They used to talk about using the C word and Gordon Brown wouldn't do it. And as a result, he was not telling people the truth. And we told people the truth. We won the mandate for it. We got re-elected. And I think there's a lesson, you know, one of the great themes of your podcast is, you know, talking the truth to the public. Let's get away from this populist nonsense of pretending everyone can have everything all the time. That's what the Cameron government did. And we got rewarded for it at the ballot box, not because we had smart PR or not because we had sucked up to particular newspaper groups. But he did that quite well. Well, not as effectively.”
2023-05-15 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 18: George Osborne: Austerity, Boris Johnson, and the UK's next Prime Minister · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the country, not least because most of the BBC people were in that top 20%. When I increased stamp duty on the most expensive houses, you still see endless newspaper stories about that. You know, I made a big effort to make sure that the job of filling the hole that the financial crisis had blown in our public finances, and it wasn't a temporary hole, it was a permanent hole because permanently money coming in from financial services was going to be less and permanently Britain had created a structural deficit that had to be”
2023-05-15 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 18: George Osborne: Austerity, Boris Johnson, and the UK's next Prime Minister · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just simply don't accept that. Because Britain had, for the period 2010 to 2016, the fastest recovery of all of the G7 countries. It's now a labour ambition, one of the pledge guards to have the fastest growth in the G7. We had it under the Cameron government. As I say, more jobs were created than under any previous government in British history or subsequently. And there were big improvements in the outcomes of some of our public services, things like education standards were rising, crime was falling because we were undertaking complicated reforms of those public services. And although it is true that people largely forget this now, the criticism I often got at the time was for measures that made better off people pay for this. So when I removed child benefit from the richest 20% of the country, there was more BBC coverage of that than there was for any changes I made to tax credits for the poorest 20%.”
2023-05-15 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 18: George Osborne: Austerity, Boris Johnson, and the UK's next Prime Minister · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Than at the failure of both the political leadership of the country and the institutions themselves and the professions involved to face up to the fact that most of these public services need far-reaching reform.”
2023-05-15 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 18: George Osborne: Austerity, Boris Johnson, and the UK's next Prime Minister · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For four or five years, I hear nothing from this government and I hear nothing from the Labour opposition. If you ask me, what's Labour's education policy, and I'm someone who follows these things, I haven't got a clue. I'm not really clear, although I'm beginning to get a sense that they want people to learn maths, what Rishis Sunak's education policy is. In other words, domestic public service reform, not just in education, but health, welfare, law and order. These issues, which were the great animating issues when I was an opposition MP and then became a member of the government seems to have largely sort of disappeared from the British political landscape. And that as a result means failures to properly educate our young people, failures in our health service to provide a decent level of care are blamed on levels of public expenditure, even though levels of public expenditure are historically at almost record high, rather”
2023-05-15 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 18: George Osborne: Austerity, Boris Johnson, and the UK's next Prime Minister · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's essentially lazy because it thinks that public policy problems can simply be solved by more money being thrown at them, even if that money is not available, i.e., you know, we can't borrow it and we can't raise taxes further to pay for it. Taxes already being, by the way, the post-war high. So I'll give you an example. When I was a young opposition MP, Tony Blair was the prime minister. The most interesting domestic policy issue was education. He made it a priority. People like David Blunkett were doing interesting things as education secretary. When the Cameron government came in, Cameron Clegg coalition, education and free schools and academies was a big part of our domestic agenda. Michael Goev was the education secretary doing a lot of interesting stuff there. I have not heard a single mainstream politician say anything interesting about education.”
2023-05-15 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 18: George Osborne: Austerity, Boris Johnson, and the UK's next Prime Minister · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's whether you borrow to cut taxes, which would be the sort of conservative thing to do, or borrow to spend more, which might be the labor thing to do, the trust government tried to do that. And the world said no, we're not lending Britain anymore money. And it created a financial crisis. It created a crisis in our pension funds, and it brought down the government just weeks after it had been put into office. And I think that was proof, a proof point for the things of myself, and not just myself, but of course our coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, who got a little stick for this, also were saying at the time, which is Britain cannot just borrow endlessly. It has to live within its means. And we had a real life example of what happens if you don't.”
2023-05-15 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 18: George Osborne: Austerity, Boris Johnson, and the UK's next Prime Minister · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did actually have unfortunately for our country a perfect experiment last autumn of what happens if you are not prudent, if you think you can go and borrow in the case of the trust government, this was to borrow to cut taxes.”
2023-05-15 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 18: George Osborne: Austerity, Boris Johnson, and the UK's next Prime Minister · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would beg to differ because I think every time a political party since I was Chancellor has veered off the fiscal prudence path, they've become essentially unelectable or been ejected from office.”
2023-05-15 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 18: George Osborne: Austerity, Boris Johnson, and the UK's next Prime Minister · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I would say things we've done like the OBR. Now, I'm afraid, you know, to my point of view, leaving the EU is now an accepted kind of consensus. I don't think the fact we left the single market and the customs union is accepted. I think the people...”
2023-05-15 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 18: George Osborne: Austerity, Boris Johnson, and the UK's next Prime Minister · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I personally think it's highly unlikely. I think we could rejoin something that looks akin to the single market or the customs union. I think there's a great, I did an event with Ed Balls this week in the House of Lords, and he made a really good observation, and he was my great kind of political rival back in the day. He said, you know, if you do something that is not accepted by the other side, that doesn't become part of the consensus, it doesn't last. And the real achievements in politics are the things that everyone accepts eventually, like Bank of England independence or the Labour's minimum wage.”
2023-05-15 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 18: George Osborne: Austerity, Boris Johnson, and the UK's next Prime Minister · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in Britain in 2016 was buzzing. Full employment. The incomes of the lowest 20 were rising rapidly because we'd introduced the national living wage. Britain was becoming a kind of the global centre for business and finance. It was an exciting people looking at the UK and saying that's the example we want to follow. Unfortunately, that is not the case today. I'm not saying it's irrecoverable. We have obviously suffered a great setback in not just leaving the European Union, but the way we've left the European Union and exiting Margaret Thatcher's single market and all of that. Not saying again, we can't do things about it. I'm realistic. We're not going to rejoin the EU.”
2023-05-15 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 18: George Osborne: Austerity, Boris Johnson, and the UK's next Prime Minister · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Strongest growth in the G7. We give more jobs were created under the Cameron government than any other government in British history, so we avoided that mass unemployment threat that looked very real in 2010. So I think there's a lot to be proud of or what we did. But look, where I tell you we're going to agree is that then something happened in 2016, which did put the country back, set the country back. And that was the Brexit referendum and the result of that.”
2023-05-15 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 18: George Osborne: Austerity, Boris Johnson, and the UK's next Prime Minister · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the same like saying, well, first of all, of course, you know, governments in charge take responsibility both for the upsides when economies generally do well and the downsides when they don't. The major government was pinned for Black Wednesday, even though many other countries suffered difficult problems that day. I would make a broader point. I don't think, you know, I don't want to get back into ancient history of when I was shadow chancellor. I think Britain was particularly exposed to that crash when it came. I don't think the banking system was as well regulated as it could have been. And we suffered more than most. It was a bigger crash in Britain than it was in many other European countries. And I would say the economic policies we pursued after 2010 meant that we actually had”
2023-05-15 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 18: George Osborne: Austerity, Boris Johnson, and the UK's next Prime Minister · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A bit like saying to Mrs. Lincoln that the play was okay apart from the assassination of her husband. I mean, the Labour record was kind of fine until we had the biggest crash in recent British history.”
2023-05-15 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 18: George Osborne: Austerity, Boris Johnson, and the UK's next Prime Minister · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“His Chancellor, and David Cameron and myself and others took a risk in that 2010 general election of saying to people, look, there are some really hard decisions that are going to flow as a result of what's happened to the British economy. And as a result, I think we commanded the confidence of the British people during that period as we've made those difficult decisions, precisely because we had fronted up to them what was going to be required before an election. And that was why we were elected five years later. And I would say, you know, one of the reasons why the labor body has been largely irrelevant in British politics for the last 13 years is because it has not come to terms with the basic truth, which is a country has to live within its means. And it's only now relevant because you have in someone like Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, K.S. Lambert, people are beginning to say, look, we agree. There's not much money to go around and we're going to have to be very tough about how that money is allocated.”
2023-05-15 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 18: George Osborne: Austerity, Boris Johnson, and the UK's next Prime Minister · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't want to sort of start by disagreeing with you, Hasta, but I do. And I don't dismiss those issues. I think there's a lot more we need to be doing on mental health. And we've actually worked together on that kind of thing before. I think there's a particular challenge with rough sleeping. And we've shown in the past that that can be tackled. It's not just a question of resources. But on the overall big question of austerity, there's a very simple truth, which is if you have a very large financial crash or economic crisis, the country pays the price. And that is what happened 15 years ago with the big financial crisis. And it was a lie to tell people at the time that there was never going to be a price to be paid for that. And I think the reason the Gordon Brown government was ejected was because Gordon Brown did not tell the truth to people about the consequences of that crash, although Alistair Darling tried.”
2023-05-15 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 18: George Osborne: Austerity, Boris Johnson, and the UK's next Prime Minister · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source