and chile let outi an almighty roar. this is bbc news, the headlines: president putin has said ukrainian intelligence services planned and carried out saturday's explosion that damaged the only bridge to the occupied crimean peninsula. he described it as a terrorist attack aimed at destroying critically important civilian infrastructure. elswehere ukrainian authorities say at least 17 people have been killed by russian missile strikes on the city of zaporizhzhia. anti—government demonstrations have continued in iran despite heavy measures by the security forces. state media there says the security forces used tear gas to disperse protests in dozens of cities across the country. despite an internet blackout imposed by the authorities, videos are continuing to emerge

of widespread unrest. taiwan's president tsai ing—wen has pledged to bolster the island's combat power and defences in a major speech on taiwan's national day. now on bbc news, political thinking with nick robinson. hello and welcome to political thinking. there is one question which haunts the chancellor, haunts any chancellor of any political party stopping it is, what will the iss say? because the verdict of the institute for fiscal studies on whether the numbers add up, any budget or what we these days 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 iss on our programmes all the time. our guest is the director of the institute for fiscal studies, the ifs, paul johnston, welcome to political thinking. if the ifs is the word of god, that makes you got. how does that feel? very stran . e! got. how does that feel? very strange! the _ got. how does that feel? very strange! the ifs, _ got. how does that feel? very strange! the ifs, all- got. how does that feel? very strange! the ifs, all we - got. how does that feel? very strange! the ifs, all we are i got. how does that feel? very | strange! the ifs, all we are as it were as we are a research institute who happened to work on fiscal things, that means public spending and tax and when the government or the opposition make announcements on tax and spending, we analyse it and we analyse it off the back of decades now of experience that we have got with the numbers, with understanding 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! chuckles it is hard to get one�*s head around the idea that this has the impact... you have to be careful because it is easy to be talking to you right now, the idea there might be thousands of people listening is one that almost does not occur to you at 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 needs to be done. 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, really. you must think, have i gone too far there? have i sounded hyperbolic rather than cool and judgemental? 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 government tax and spending. it is about interest rates and printing money and so on. fiscal is pretty much everything the government does 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 were around for the vote about brexit, three general elections, the scottish independence referendum, you had corbyn economics and now you have trussonomics. is this moment feel as hot as any of them? a, is this moment feel as hot as any of them?— any of them? a lot of it has felt the 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 as good or everything about leaving is good whereas actually the economics may get 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 few weeks from the chancellor. that gives us lots of opportunities to explain what is there and what its impacts are likely to be. certainly a big moment. i don't think it has been qualitatively different from what we've seen in the past. prime minister's attacked the talking heads that taxi from north london to the bbc studio to dismiss anybody challenging the status quo. where do you live? like you, north london.

i don't know whether it counts as a town house, a 1960s terrace, but today i cycled down from our offices. 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 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 because there is no precise thing that is 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, such as investing in education rather than reducing spending on education, which the government hasn't done. 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. lets 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, i think, 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 at the ifs but it is just a private organisation.

it is a charity. it's a research institution. it is almost by accident. we were set up about 50 years ago by tax professionals who are 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 into be likejohnson and pontificating on the today programme, this is about 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 they used to be. is there not a ifs day out where you played fiscaljust a minute? i think that really did happen. i suppose we could be.

the niche one was a name that article, you remove the name of it and you had to guess who wrote it. there are some amazing articles. you could not make it up. how did it start? was economics discussed in thejohnson household? god, 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 a terribly easy childhood. i went to a school which was later shut down as 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 wanted to make a career on it, analysing and communicating about it. if i could meet the young pauljohnson, and show him you now, would he believe it all? he would be amazed. the nerdy kid who now hopefully somebody is listening to would be quite something. in some ways amazed, in some ways really delighted that it's being interested and excited by this important stuff. you went to oxford. you did politics philosophy and economics. one of your tutors said you were quite quiet back then. quiet, low—key, very 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 edward have been at the time. the left caucus. within college, there are some 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. i am in awe, actually, of politicians who are able to do that. can't imagine 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 extraordinary hard thing to do. how does pauljohnson, who has been pretty left—wing, ed balls tells a story about you staring a carpet in a tutorial when he said, what's wrong with capitalism anyway? how do then work for a impartial economics institution during the height of thatcherism and stay neutral? you are recalled as working together on property, 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, but you are to look at the numbers and reach conclusions. other people make the politicaljudgements. i think that's absolutely crucial.

we do work on policy, 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 could say it is less high than it is in the us, more than in western europe, about the same it was 30 years ago. is that too high or do you want to do things that change that? that is the politicaljudgement 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 this job at the ifs. we always have to remind ourselves, institute for... for, not of. very important to make the distinction. austerity. quite soon after he 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, the problem is "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 are cut, even if the numbers up may be very bad for the economy as a whole. do you accept that criticism? that misses a lot of what we do. a lot of what you will see of the ifs on the airwaves is just about that, but we work on all sorts of things like pensions. we spent a lot of time during the austerity years pointing out what it meant for spending on schools. either way, still what it is per—pupil but we were spending 12 years ago and actually less than further education. we showed what that meant as we were talking about right now, poverty, inequality, and all of those things. we were never, as it were, pro—austerity. what we were saying was first,

that 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. in other words "there is a black hole in the finances "of the government". year in, year out, i made a lot of my career on asking lots of questions to gordon brown and george osborne about the black hole. and i suppose the critique is, it assumes the hole has to be filled either by spending cuts or tax rises. i think people on the left would say that would drive 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 said when you did the sums on brexit, you ignored what they said other 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. and simply doing the numbers, what liz truss calls the abacus economics, cannot reach. that's not true on a few levels. the first thing to say about brexit is that it was awkward for an organisation like aifs because we only do the economics and not the politics. there are good political reasons for wanting to leave the european union. but the economics

are very 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 judgement 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". well, 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. where you right? did i say that? that is an example of a mistake in terms of the hyperbole that i may have used. i think you were talking to the times while on holiday. perhaps you were a little less cautious. yes. i remember that conversation. i had just arrived on holiday and they rang me on a sunday

morning. but the — 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 reduced its forecast alongside —— produced is 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. and 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 sterling market with the bank of england and so on. there is space for those sorts of policies but they need to be carefully thought through. "oh, yes," say liz truss's supporters, but that is the problem of the economic orthodoxy. you have to satisfy pauljohnson, the obr, and everybody else. then they say economics has got it wrong over the years. they didn't spot that there would be a huge increase in inflation. what we call quantitative easing or, as we say the printing of money, by the bank of england was always going to fuel inflation. and you conventional economists, the orthodox

treasury world, you all got it wrong. economic orthodoxy... orthodoxy is a terrible word, isn't it? it means accumulated knowledge and evidence across a large period of time over a large number of countries. so, orthodoxy in that sense covers a lot. so in a sense the governments of sweden, denmark, france, germany, 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 find themselves 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.

i think there's a very good case for saying you should make big changes to the economy. 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 of 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 frontline politician but you but you have in the past looked in more detail at government policy. you did a review of 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 in northern ireland. so, 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.

and you wrote a rather passionate piece about your experience of your son's education — very contrasting experiences on what it had taught you about what was wrong with the education world. yeah, i have four sons. what i was talking about there was one of my sons struggled in the academic education world for various reasons. and what i wrote about was, well, it is very easy, isn't it, to go into work on education? i think ithinki i think i did fine in education and so did my colleagues and my oldest son is so everything must be basically fine. i didn't really believe it. 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. and he is thriving in that world in a way he didn't thrive

in school. so, somebody wants somebody to run parts of the education world, you are available? i am available for any decentjob. chuckles. what attracts you for the future? you aren't going to do this for the rest of your life. gosh, that's the hardest question. what will i do when i grow up? chuckles. i genuinely don't know. the worst thing about my currentjob is that it is difficult to think of anything better to go on to. if you are offering me a job on the today programme, nick, iwould bite your hand off. excellent. you were described as a failed treasury economist once. marvellous! because they did not like your forecast. vote leave said you were a paid arm of the eu because you took some eu grants. it seems to be extraordinarily likely in the weeks and months to come that you will personally become a target of some of liz truss's supporters 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, we are in the vanguard of the programme orthodoxy. —— pro—growth orthodoxy. it is pro—growth orthodoxy outside of it in some sense. it is normal to be attacked from all sides. if you look through hansard, you will find most all of the frontbenchers, all lots of the frontbenchers, all lots of the frontbenchers on both sides of the house, quoting 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. i think 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. chuckles. thank you very much.

tottenham court road at the moment, nick. tottenham court road. thank you very much forjoining me on political thinking. thank you. as pauljohnson said, 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 of the word "johnson" might be used once or twice in the difficult weeks and months to come. thanks for watching. until next week.

the heavy rain has been clearing from scotland and northern ireland and making its way south across england and wales through the night, slowing down as a narrowing band of rain as it heads toward southern and eastern areas and behind it it does leave a chillier end to the night in scotland and northern ireland, milderfurther scotland and northern ireland, milder further south but some spray and standing water through the morning rush across southern and eastern parts of england and wales and all throughout, it will remain windy with gales or parts of northern scotland. a brisk and carrying on a few showers but much drier and brighter generally across scotland and northern ireland compared with sunday and the rain moves away from the south and east by the end of the morning. just drags its heels a little. temperature is just a degree down on the weekend because the winds from the north—west but the like entering the night on monday into tuesday. it allows actually won especially for england and wales, a touch of frost in rural areas and with the winds following light, some mist and fog once again. on tuesday follows mostly dry and fine, more rain midweek.

to shy away from.

welcome to bbc news, i'm david eades. our top stories: president putin blames ukraine for what he calls a �*terrorist attack�* on a key bridge linking russia to crimea. translation: there is no doubt that this is an of terrorism, - aimed at destroying russia's critically important civilian infrastructure. no end to the protests across iran in defiance of violent repression by the security forces. the un considers a request by haiti to send in military help to tackle the chaos caused by gangs on the island. taiwan prepares to celebrate its national day, but it's in the shadow of growing economic and military threats from china.