Coming up #Newsnight

🔥 rail renationalisation?
🔥 catch and kill Trump trial - excl UK TV intvw with key National Enquirer editor Lachlan Cartwright
🔥 record rents/ house building slump - key electoral battleground. We have a renter & landlord to debate.
Nicholas Watt Ben Chu

This is a sign of the way in which govt presentation of spending has been degraded over time. I'd claim it started with Gordon Brown and Charlie Whelan cumulating current (resource) spending changes over years (which we would refuse to do)

The Institute for Fiscal Studies's Ben Zaranko has reverse engineered the full spreadsheet shenanigans of HMT on defence spending here 👀👇

(BTW If you're at all interested in the public finances and you're not following Ben on here you're doing it wrong!)

x.com/BenZaranko/sta…

'£75 billion increase in defence spending' is political arithmetic:
- adds up all the cash increases over the next five years ('your pay's going up by £200 - over 5 yrs, that's a £1k pay rise')
- compares that with letting defence budget fall as a share of GDP (v unlikely).

I'm loving this series - very funny but also seriously thought provoking 📻👇

Would you marry a chatbot?

After years of bad dates and toxic relationships, Chris finally found love, over instant messaging …

📻 listen to our latest episode of Helen Lewis has left the chat - on BBC Radio 4 at 9.30am this morning 📻

bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00…

Some context for that '£75 billion' figure ministers are using for the promised increased in defence spending 👇