This is another Tweet, just posted:

So, the Tories are back on the austerity agenda with planned spending cuts that no one thinks are deliverable, and which are the real explanation for today’s tax give away.

I will be spending this lunchtime in the studios of Radio Two at Wogan House in London, WC1. This has been the case for almost every autumn statement, budget, and other major fiscal announcement by the government for well over a decade now.

Just after 1.30, whether the Chancellor has finished or not, I will be joining Jeremy Vine live on air to discuss what the Chancellor has had to say. Mark Littlewood, the outgoing chief executive of the Institute of Economic Affairs, who was Liz Truss’s main economic advisor, and who has apparently been dropped from her list of nominees for the House of Lords, will be joining us.

I admit that this is one of the most stressful broadcasts that I do each year. Whereas I am usually pretty relaxed in front of the microphone, talking about what the Chancellor has said, based solely on the speech and without having had the chance to read any of the notes that are published to explain what he really means, always has some risk inherent in it.

That said, there are some things that are predictable. I have already made it clear that I do not approve of any of the tax cuts that are likely today. I also very strongly suspect that there will be very little investment in public services. If so, I will be making that point. And, the failure of this statement to tackle inequality, which I anticipate will be high on my agenda.

Meanwhile, I can entirely predict that Mark Littlewood will be saying that there are far too few cuts, and that growth will be too low. He will not, of course, consider the consequences of that growth, let alone the green issues involved.

Once that is over I begin writing comments for a number of n people, including here.

Meanwhile if you want to follow my thinking during the speech and are on Twitter, I will be tweeting throughout it.

This is the morning when I know that almost anything I right now will be the equivalent of chip paper by lunchtime. Any speculation on what Jeremy Hunt might say today is, most particularly this year when so many things have been mooted as possibilities, particularly pointless. In that case, I will discuss a general point and not a specific forecast.

The only point on which all commentators appear to agree this morning is that the strongest possible hint has been provided that today’s autumn statement (or budget) will include details of tax cuts.

The one thing that I can say for certain is that the last thing that we need today is tax cuts.

A one per cent cut in the income tax rate would cost around £7 billion. The benefits would go to all taxpayers, whatever their income level. The greatest benefit will go to those with the highest levels of income because the higher the income that a person has, the bigger the gain that they get from a percentage fall in the tax rate. That is a simple arithmetic fact. So too is it a simple fact that those who do not pay tax cannot benefit from a tax rate cut. Their gain comes to precisely nothing.

A cut of one per cent in national insurance is even more discriminatory. The cost is approximately £5 billion per annum, with the difference between this cut and that for income tax being that pensioners are excluded.

Meanwhile, whilst everyone has gone quiet on the issue, I suspect that inheritance tax cuts will be mentioned today. They may well be one of the many NITMO offerings (‘not in my term of office’), meaning that they will have no impact until after the coming general election, but I think that they are likely to be proposed, nonetheless. The entire benefit will, of course, go to those already wealthy.

It is also widely rumoured that there will be a substantial change to corporation tax because the £9 billion per annum deduction made temporarily available last year to soften the blow of the increase in the rate to 25%, as a result of which large companies can offset their entire capital expenditure cost against their taxable profits in the year in which that capital expense is incurred will, it will be announced, continue into the future, making it another NITMO issue that will be used to taunt Labour. Since the incidence of corporation tax is almost entirely on shareholders (although there are economists who argue otherwise), this benefit will also flow to the already wealthy, who are always the biggest beneficiaries of lower tax rates paid by the companies that they own.

In other words, any tax cut today will be deeply selective, with a very strong bias towards those with higher incomes. Those most in need will lose out, entirely. Those on low incomes will gain a little, at best. If, in that case, this is the focus of the autumn statement, it will have three typically Tory consequences.

Firstly, it will deliberately benefit the best off.

Secondly, it will deliberately increase inequality in the UK.

Thirdly, it will deliberately increase the divisions in our society.

Meanwhile, the Tories will claim that such cuts will encourage enterprise, increase the amount of work that people are willing to do, and will, therefore, increase growth.

As I noted when being interviewed on Radio Five yesterday, in my entire career as a practising chartered accountant not one client told me that a cut in the tax rate would ever impact the amount of work that they were willing to do. Firstly, that was because very few knew what that rate was. Secondly, it was because those who were running their own businesses rarely knew precisely what their profits were until well after the time that they were earned. Thirdly, it was because, even if they knew what their income was, their ability to relate that directly to the amount of tax they might pay was decidedly limited because of the complexity of the tax system. In other words, whilst this link between tax paid and effort expended might look to be obvious on an economist's whiteboard when teaching students, in the real world and with small tax changes the impact is almost certainly non-existent.

So, if this is the focus of today, then what we will be looking at is a Tory tax giveaway to those most likely to vote for them in exchange, from which we will see no overall economic gain to the economy of any great significance, not least because those who will benefit most (the best of) are the most likely to save everything that they gain from a tax cut.

I can hope for better. I suspect my hope will be forlorn.

Having now done what I expect to be my last pre-Budget radio comment, I can concentrate on preparing for tomorrow's immediate post-budget comment on Radio 2 at about 1.35 pm.

The difficulty with doing so is that so much is in the mix in this budget, and the steers being given by the Chancellor and Prime Minister are really quite varied as to their content.

On top of that, there is, inevitably, Andrew Bailey from the Bank of England muttering in the background. He gave a speech yesterday in which he said there was no room for any significant cuts in interest rates any time soon and that hard times are not over yet. I am sure that the timing was deliberate. This will be the framing of this budget. The message he is sending is that he has not got the recession he craves as yet and still wants it, whatever the cost. Good luck to the Chancellor with a friend like that in your camp.

So, what will Hunt do? First, he will work with small sums of money: Bailey gives him no choice but to do so, although Bailey is wrong, of course.

Second, I think Hunt's trailing of inheritance tax cuts was clever because I very much doubt that they are going to happen, at least this side of a general election. At best, he will announce a plan to cut the tax in stages from 2025 onwards, knowing that it is utterly meaningless when no Tory will go near the Treasury for a decade or more after the next election.

Third, there will be other cuts of that sort: income tax may well be cut for 2025/25, but not beforehand. The aim is to set elephant traps for Labour, who will then have to say what they will do with regard to those plans.

More pragmatically, there may be a national insurance cut, although it is so untargeted I fail to see why. There would have to be an increase in the rate over £50,000 to match the cut under £50,000 for it to be even remotely justifiable and fair. Justifying that to pensioners and those on benefits will also be hard - but maybe the Tories just do not care about that. They do not pay NI, of course.

And businesses will get a cut: I suspect the small business rate of corporation tax will fall in April next year, which has no impact in terms of tax paid until the Tories are out of office.

Maybe big business will keep 100% expending of investment costs as well - which is ludicrous when so much business capital expenditure is designed to undermine net-zero targets.

What else? Benefit adjustments will be mean.

There will be almost nothing for public spending.

And there will be lots of noise on supply-side reforms like planning and pension changes - plus Hunt's ISA plans, none of which will have the slightest impact on anything that happens in people's lives between now and whenever the Tories are swept from office.

It is being said that this will be a 'big fiscal event'. When you're playing with 1.5% of government spending at most, I don't see that.

I think we'll see political game-playing and a poorly judged use of public money. But I could be wrong, of course. Tomorrow, we'll know.