the explosion that severely damaged its state—of—the—art and well—defended bridge to crimea. officials in the ukrainian city of zaporizhzia say 17 people have been killed by a russian missile strike on an apartment block. former uk culture secretary nadine dorries says prime minister liz truss needs a fresh mandate if she wants to avoid facing a wipe—out at the next general election. in iran, protestors appear to hack into state—run television as demonstrations against the regime continue. now it's time for politcal thinking with nick robinson. welcome to political thinking. one question haunts the chancellor, haunts any chancellor of any political party. it is, what will the ifs say? because the verdict

of the institute for fiscal studies on whether the numbers add up, in any budget, or what these days we have to call fiscal event, can be devastating for a politician. that verdict is treated like the word of god, not least by broadcasters like the bbc who have experts from the ifs on our programmes all the time. my guest this week is the director of the ifs, pauljohnson. welcome to the programme. if the ifs is the word of god, that makes you god. how does that feel? very strange. he chuckles all we are, as it were, we are a research institute who happen to work on fiscal things, which means public spending and tax, and when the government or the opposition make big announcements on tax and spending,

we analyse it and we analyse it off the back of decades of experience we've got. with the numbers, with understanding of what this stuff means. so we are able to say, do these add up? will it achieve what the chancellor says it will achieve? and what are the risks? when martin lewis was in that seat, the money saving expert, of course, and he has a similar status now it seems to me around the cost of living issues, he said to me that it made him feel physically sick, the fact that people look to him for that sort of guidance. do you ever not sleep at night or worry about it or is itjust what goes with the job? i don't sleep at night for all sorts of reasons! he chuckles it is hard to get one's head around the idea that this has the impact... you have to be very careful because it is easy to be talking to you now, in the studio, the idea there might be thousands

of people also listening is one that almost does not occur to you quite a lot of the time. that can lead to errors. i have huge sympathy with politicians who have made mistakes in what they say because that is a terribly easy thing to do in this sort of circumstance. but it does feel difficult. it does feel stressful at times. but i believe it is something that's worth doing. do you want to confess to an error? we have made errors, of course. the last election, something we put out had an error in it, we had to ring round all of the journalists and say, sorry, we got this wrong. in terms of what i've said on air, i'm sure i've made one, but i cannot bring any to mind. you must think, have i gone too far there? have i sounded hyperbolic, rather than cool and judgmental? i think there are times when i've done that. you get caught up in the excitement of the moment. i do find fiscal things exciting, i'm afraid. what a terrible confession!

you tried to translate it a second ago, it is a dreadful word, isn't it? and when i use it i think, how do you explain it? how do you explain fiscal? even when i studied economics, i wasn't that sure what fiscal meant. it is really government tax and spending. monetary is what the bank of england does, printing money. fiscal is pretty much everything the government does in getting money in and how it spends it. you've been doing this job for about 11 years. i cannot think of a period of fiscal debates and the numbers adding up have been hotter. you had the debate about scottish independence, brexit, austerity, three general elections, you had corbynomics, now you have trussonomics. does this moment feel as hot as any of them?

a lot has felt hot. i look back at the austerity years and that was relatively straightforward. i think the referendums were particularly difficult because we just look at the economics and the economics may come up against the politics in those sorts of circumstances. when you have a yes—no referendum, everybody says everything about remaining is good or everything about leaving is good whereas actually the economics may get it in the way of that. when it comes to elections, we don't find it that hard. normally, there are good things to say and bad things to say about both parties, whatever they are both saying. right now, we have a very big shift in fiscal policy, as we have seen in the last couple of weeks from the chancellor. that gives us lots of opportunities to explain what is there and what its impact is likely to be. certainly a big moment. i don't think it has been qualitatively different from what we've seen in the past.

the prime minister has attacked "the talking heads that taxi from north london town houses to the bbc studio to dismiss anybody challenging the status quo." where do you live? like you, north london. i don't know if it is a town house, a 1960s terrace, but today i cycled down from our offices off tottenham cort road. do you think, though, that she and others in the government, when they have a go at the anti—growth forces, have they got you in mind? well, i hope not, because we have been very pro—growth. what are the anti—growth forces that are being described? i think those who are against planning reform, those against tax reform, those who haven't been investing enough in education and infrastructure and so on. we've been talking for a long time about the importance of all of those things if you want growth. there is a truth that there are trade—offs here. we talk about these all the time. that's why it's complicated and we annoy everybody because there is never one thing

that is precisely right. i think over the last decade and more, governments have been on the wrong side of this. they've not focused enough on growth. there is a reason for that. it is because it is politically difficult. politically difficult to build new houses and roads and airports and so on in places people don't want them. it is politically difficult to reform tax because that leaves some people better off and some people worse off. other things aren't so politically difficult that governments haven't done, such as investing in education, rather than reducing spending on education. i would say personally and most of the economics profession is very much in favour of the sort of supply—side reforms which might lead to growth which i think the prime minister is in favour of. let's talk more about that later on. let's first get a sense of where this institute comes from. you said something which will already surprise a lot of listeners and viewers, it's not official. i think you are so much

part of the furniture of british public life, people assume there is some sort of constitutional status of the ifs, but it is just a private organisation. it is a charity. it's a research institution. we exist almost by accident. we were set up 50 years ago by four tax professionals who were fed up with some of the tax policies that were being made up in the 1960s. we gradually morphed since then into an economic research organisation. it literally owns nothing. it has no assets, no money in the bank. when we recruit new graduates to come into the ifs, i will say to them, look, this isn't coming in to be likejohnson and pontificating on the today programme, this is about sitting here for 8—10 hours a day, doing statistical analysis, analysing data, and applying serious economics to these problems. what you might see is the froth on the top. are they all nerds?

i hear there used to be an ifs day out where you played fiscaljust a minute. i think that happened in the past. i think it's fair to say we are mostly nerds. the game that struck me, niche, was name that article, you remove the reference to the article and you knew who had written it. there are some amazing articles. you could not make it up. how did it start? was economics discussed in thejohnson house? was politics a subject around the kitchen table? goodness, no. none of that at all. why i am like i am is a difficult question. you probably don't want to get into it, but i did not have an easy childhood. i went to a school which was later shut down, was failing, but i kind of survived by being a nerd and focusing on the schoolwork. that was your escape? essentially, yes.

so was listening to the today programme at an unhealthily early age and being excited and interested in policies and politics from an early age. it is a huge privilege to think that, from the age of, i don't know, 13, 14, i was interested in this stuff and i managed to make a career out of it, analysing and communicating about it. if i could meet the young pauljohnson, show him the you now, would he believe it all? he would be amazed. the nerdy kid who now hopefully somebody is listening to. that would be quite something. in some ways, amazed, in some ways, really delighted being interested and excited by this important stuff, recognisably the same. you went to oxford.

you did politics, philosophy and economics. one of your tutors said you were quite quiet back then. tim besley, economics tutor at oxford, he said, quiet, low—key, interested in economics, but quite low—key? i'm not sure i was that quiet, but there were quite a lot of noisy people around. your tutorial parlour. yes, for example, there was one ed balls, so getting a word in edgeways in that group was a little challenging. that was a very different kind of world to the one that i had been used to. rumour has it you were a bit more left—wing than him as a student? that would be true, i think. lots of students who are interested in politics, then one took a particular view of politics and i was more involved in labour politics then than ed would have been at the time. the left caucus. within college, there are some slightly strange students who got together who had left—wing views at that stage in life, but rather like you, i have left my

student politics behind. there are plenty of people who have embarrassing pasts! that's true. did you think, maybe politics is for me, at that stage? i think there was a point early in life when i thought that, but i change my mind really quite quickly. i started my working life at the ifs straight out of university. lots of things in between, before i came back again, but i started working life there. very quickly, you realise that nobody has a monopoly on wisdom, they are all being a little bit careful with the full facts, as it were, but thirdly, you could have much more... i could, given who i am and my personality and so on, i could have much more impact if i were properly independent and doing the objective end of things. i couldn't begin to imagine taking a party whip now. people have to do it.

iam in awe, actually, of politicians who are able to do that. because it is so restrictive, you mean? yes. all parties have part of the answer, part of the truth, and all of them also get pushed out to talk about things they clearly don't believe in, which must be an extremely hard thing to do. how does young pauljohnson, who has been pretty left—wing, ed balls tells a story about you staring at a carpet in a tutorial when he said, what's wrong with capitalism anyway? how do then work for an impartial economics institution during the height of thatcherism and stay impartial? you worked for steve webb who went on to be a lib dem minister. he recalls you working together on poverty, and you both having to accept, because the boss was andrew dilnot, you aren't here to comment on whether that is a good or a bad thing, you are here to look at the numbers and reach conclusions.

other people make the politicaljudgments. i think that's absolutely crucial. we do lots of work on poverty, we do work on inequality, we can point out the impact of policies on that. we study inequality a lot. we look at how the structure of poverty has changed over time. but i think it is for other people to decide, is the inequality too high? we can say it is less high than it is in the us, more high than in western europe, about the same as it was 30 years ago. is that too high or not? do you want to do things that change that? that is the political judgment and one that we try at least to shy away from. let's go into some of those difficult political waters you had to be in, in thisjob at the ifs. we always have to remind ourselves, institute for, not institute of. for is very important. austerity. quite soon after you became director of the ifs, hugely political.

it raises one of the interesting questions about the limits of what you do. people on the left would say, look, if you only look at what is called technically the microeconomics, whether the numbers add up, you lose the bigger picture, which is what the impact on society is of austerity, for example. and whether it is actually long—term making us poorer because the consequences of cuts, even if they make the numbers add up, may be very bad for the economy as a whole. do you accept that criticism? i think that misses most of what we do. a lot of what you will see of the ifs on the airwaves is on public finances, but actually we work on all sorts of things, like welfare, pensions, education, health. we spent a lot of time during austerity years pointing out what it meant for spending on schools. still, by the way, per pupil no higher than it was 12 years ago. quite extraordinary.

less, in fact, in further and vocational education. we showed what that meant, as we were talking aboutjust now, poverty, inequality, and all of those things. we were never, as it were, pro—austerity, what we were saying was, this is having this significant effect in terms of cutting spending and what effect that is having. and the government has said it wants to achieve this set of fiscal targets. here is whether it will do that or not. the language of the ifs for a long time was the language of the black hole. there is a black hole in the finances of the government. i made a bit of my career on asking lots of questions to gordon brown and george osborne about the black hole. i suppose the critique is, it assumes the hole has to be filled either by spending cuts or tax rises. that people on the left would argue drives you towards more right—wing solutions. i hope we did not ourselves use the black hole very often. it is no more than a shorthand.

what we were doing was... george osborne set himself a set of fiscal targets, as did ed balls when he was shadow chancellor, and what we were trying to do was to say, well, they say they want to achieve this, is the set of policies they have set out likely to do that? let's turn to the other side of politics. the debate on brexit. not automatically a left—right argument, but there are probably more leavers on the right than on the left, at least prominent ones. they say, when you did the sums on brexit, you ignored out the dynamic effects, the possibility that brexit would unleash new innovation, for example, deregulation, for example. all sorts of things which might make the economy grow, which simply doing the numbers, what liz truss calls doing the abacus economics, cannot get to. that's wrong on a number of bases. the first thing about brexit,

it was awkward for an organisation like the ifs because we only do the economics and not the politics. of course, there are good political reasons for wanting to leave the european union. but the economics are clear. if you sever links with your biggest, nearest, richest trading partner, you will be worse off. that may well be a price worth paying. that's the political judgment to make. that is why i say it is difficult in the referendum situation because you have remainers saying everything about it is wonderful and leaving would be disastrous. that's not true. and you have the leavers saying everything about leaving will be good, well, that's not true either. that brings us to where we are now and that phrase i mentioned, liz truss�* attack on abacus economics. you did say before she became prime minister that she would completely crash the public finances. were you right? did i say that? that is an example

of a mistake in terms of the hyperbole i may have used! i think you were talking to the times while on holiday. being a little less cautious. i remember that conversation. yes, i had just arrived on holiday and they rang me on a sunday morning. clearly, we have seen in the last couple of weeks that the chancellor has announced £15 billion of tax cuts and i am fairly confident that, had the office for budget responsibility produced its forecast alongside that, it would have shown that that put the public finances on an unsustainable path. what i mean is that the debt would be ever rising, unless spending were cut. again, absolutely pro and in favour of pro—growth policies, the sorts of tax reform and planning reform, infrastructure investment, education investment that gives you growth in the long run. governments can make a big difference to growth.

that is a lot of what economics is all about. it what a lot of our work is about. you can make a difference to growth, but it requires a lot more than big, unfunded tax cuts. and we have seen over the last couple of weeks that that's probably going to have a deleterious effect on the economy in the short run because it has caused problems on the gilts and sterling markets, with the bank of england and so on. there is space for those sorts of policies but they need to be carefully thought through. yes, say liz truss�*s supporters, but that is the problem with the economic orthodoxy — it stops you from doing anything different. you have to satisfy pauljohnson, the obr, and everybody else. and they say economics has got it wrong over the years. they didn't spot that there would be a huge increase in inflation. some on the right did. they said, supply is too big.

they said quantitative easing — printing of money by the bank of england — was always going to fuel inflation. you conventional economists, the orthodox treasury world, you all got it wrong. economic orthodoxy... orthodoxy is a horrible word. what it really means is accumulated knowledge and experience and evidence over a very long period of time, across a very large number of people and countries. orthodoxy in that sense covers a lot, so, in a sense, the governments of sweden, denmark, france, germany, they are following economically orthodox policies, which are much higher tax, much higher spending, higher regulation than we do, but so are the governments of australia, the us, canada, singapore, perhaps not singapore in quite the same way, but a lot of other countries

also following what you would describe as being economically orthodox. it covers a huge range of things. what doesn't sit within it is the idea that, whether you are on the left or the right, there is a free lunch somewhere and that free lunch is either massive public spending unfunded or massive tax cuts unfunded. you can make big changes to the economy. there is a very big case for saying you should. but they need to be long—term, sustainable, and carefully put in place. there isn't a free lunch sitting out there. it's not the case that every policymaker in the world has been so stupid that they did not work out that the one thing you could do was slash taxes and everything would be fine, or massively increase public spending and everything would be fine, it is just harder than that. you've done thisjob for a long time. in future, could you be involved in policy—making? you don't have to be a front—line politician, but you have in the past looked in more detail at whether people should be effectively obliged to pay towards their pensions, for example. is that the sort of thing you'd like to do more of in the future? yeah, and i've recently done

a review on whether more tax policy should be devolved to northern ireland. i've worked with the devolved governments on that as well. when the opportunities arise to be involved more directly, i do tend to take them. you wrote a rather passionate piece about your experience of your son's education, a very contrasting experience of what it had taught you about what was wrong with the education world. i have four sons. one of my sons, who struggled in the academic education world for various reasons, and what i wrote about was... well, it is very easy to go into work on education and think, i did fine in education, so did my colleagues, so did my oldest son, so everything must be basically fine. i didn't really believe that. but you really feel it when you experience it more directly. it has also made me very passionate about the importance of other

chances, apprenticeships and so on, because he's now doing staggeringly well, having done a higher—level apprenticeship. he is thriving in that world in a way he didn't thrive in school. so, if somebody wants somebody to run part of the education world, you are available? i am available for any decentjob. he chuckles what attracts you for the future? you aren't going to do this for the rest of your life. that's the hardest question. what will i do when i grow up? i genuinely don't know. the worst thing about my currentjob is that it is hard to think of anything better to go on to. if you are offering me a job on the today programme, i would bite your hand off. excellent. damian mcbride who worked for gordon brown described you as a failed treasury economist once. didn't like your forecast. marvellous. vote leave said you were part of a paid arm of the eu because you took some eu grants.

it seems likely in the coming weeks and months you will become a target of some of liz truss�* supporters who will say you are part of the anti—growth orthodoxy. how will you deal with that? partly by trying to point out that actually we are, you know, in the vanguard of the pro—growth orthodoxy. it is pro—growth orthodoxy outside of politics to some extent. it is healthy to be attacked from all sides. but if you look back through hansard, you will find that almost all of the frontbenchers or lots of them on both sides of the house quote the ifs in support of the arguments they were making at that moment. it's always very nice to see us quoted in ways that help arguments on either side of the house. you have to live with the fact that when you are saying things that are unhelpful, that that might get

thrown back at you. but it is easy to point at all sorts of things that liz truss and other people said, quoting us in support of their arguments. pauljohnson, i will let you get back to north london. thank you very much. tottenham court road at the moment, nick. thank you very much forjoining me on political thinking. as pauljohnson says, politicians of all parties have quoted the ifs to make their case. but back a few years, gordon brown wasn't mightily impressed with the verdicts of his predecessor robert choate. the word "choate" used to be shouted out to the horror of treasury officials. i have an instinct the word johnson might be used once or twice in the difficult weeks and months to come. thank you for watching. until next week.

hello. it was a pretty chilly but sunny start for some of you today, and across the south and east of england in particular we will hold onto that sunshine into the afternoon. but it is a day of change in that wet and windy weather is now spreading in across northern areas. this weather system here links into an area of low pressure around iceland, bringing a metre of snow here for some on sunday. but for us, it is rain, and developing gales. spreading through the rest of the day across much of scotland, northern ireland, some of that rain heavy at times, particularly on the hills in the west. some brighter skies out to the far west later on. rain erratic across eastern scotland, and by the end of the afternoon, cumbria, the isle of man, north—west wales will see some of that rain arrive.

much of england and wales will stay dry, with a strengthening wind. those winds to the north and west will hit gale force at times, particularly around the rain and more especially across scotland, where we could see gusts over 60 mph. that continues in the far north tonight. for the first part of the night, rain in north england and wales which will gradually clear, spreading to the south west midlands and parts of east anglia later on. a milder night here compared with last night, a fresher night further north where the sky is clear, and one or two showers will be dotted around for monday. for the monday morning commute, east anglia, the south—east and the channel islands will see some drizzle first thing before the sunshine comes out. a lot of sunshine around for monday afternoon, but north wales, north west midlands, scotland and northern ireland continuing to see a few showers around, feeling a little bit fresh in the breeze which is coming from and more north—westerly direction. as the winds fall lighter, that cooler air in place, particularly chilly night through monday to tuesday morning. monday night we could see temperatures in towns and cities around four or five degrees, some rural areas, like this morning, will see a frost.

like this morning, a fair bit of sunshine around, a fair few frosty patches for tuesday morning, a dry day with increasing amounts of cloud, some drizzle later for the west of scotland, northern ireland, temperatures down a little bit and for the middle part of the week, a weather front pushes across us, but its later on these deeper areas of low pressure pushing on a strengthening jet stream and we will see some more substantial spells of rain and strong winds, particularly across the north and west of the country. still a little rain possible to the south, but not a huge amount of rain expected again this week.

this is bbc news with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. russia investigates how and what caused the explosion that severely damaged its state—of—the—art, and well defended, bridge to crimea. officials in the ukrainian city of zaporizhzia say 17 people have been killed by a russian missile strike on an apartment block. former uk culture secretary nadine dorries says prime minister liz truss needs a fresh mandate if she wants to avoid facing a "wipeout" at the next general election. i'm still one of the liz's biggest supporters, but you have to put that into the context of the fact that we are 30 points behind labour in the polls. in iran, protestors appear to hack into state—run television, as demonstrations against the regime continue.