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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 mar ....
take the time you need to build trust. that, any peace negotiator will tell you, is the way to find a solution. this week on political thinking, my guest, the health secretary for england, victoria atkins, suggests it could be the way to find peace in the nhs, to end the strikes that have dogged the health service for more than a year. it s been a big week for her, when talks are starting once again with thejunior doctors and after a new report highlighted the horrorfor some mothers and soon to be mothers of nhs maternity services, something she has some rather powerful experience of. victoria atkins, welcome to political thinking. thank you so much, pleasure to be here. you ve said when talking about women s health, you ve said when talking about this searing indictment that we saw this week of maternity and childbirth services, this is personalfor you. why so? well, i m a mum as well as the secretary of state for health. and i had my baby on the nhs, and i have a long ....
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 shou ....