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  1. Politics
27 February 2013

PMQs review: Miliband’s New Statesman jibe backfires

After claiming that Cameron was "scraping the barrel" by quoting the NS, the Labour leader was promptly reminded that it endorsed his leadership.

By George Eaton

Without wishing to appear unduly solipsistic, it was the New Statesman that was the subject of the most memorable exchange at today’s PMQs. After Ed Miliband assailed David Cameron over the loss of Britain’s AAA credit rating, the PM retorted that the NS (“the in-house magazine of the Labour Party”) had written of the Labour leader’s approach:

His critique of the government strategy will never win back public trust, his proposals for the economy will never convince, his credibility problem will only become magnified as the general election approaches.

The quote in question was adapted from Anthony Seldon’s open letter to Ed Balls in last week’s issue (not an NS editorial as Cameron implied) calling for the shadow chancellor to “fall on his sword” and it prompted this ungenerous response from the Labour leader: “I think he’s scraping the barrel by quoting the New Statesman.”
Thanks, Ed. (P.S. We hope you like our new logo). After a swift prompt from George Osborne, Cameron went on to remind Miliband that the NS was “the only newspaper that endorsed his leadership bid” (the People excepted), leaving the Labour leader looking rather foolish. By dismissing Cameron’s NS quote out of hand, Miliband fell into a Tory trap.
Up to this point, the session had been dominated by last week’s credit downgrade, with Miliband noting just how much store Cameron and Osborne once set by the retention of AAA. But to the inevitable riposte from the PM – “it’s his policy to address excessive borrowing by borrowing more!” – Miliband could only fall back on the stock reply that ‘I ask the questions”. “Anytime he wants to swap places, I’ll answer him,” said Miliband.
What should worry Labour is that Miliband has yet to settle on a convincing response to the politically potent charge that his party would simply “borrow more”. The difference, of course, is that while Labour would borrow for growth (in the form of tax cuts and higher infrastructure spending), the coalition is borrowing to meet the costs of failure (in the form of lower growth and higher long-term unemployment).
The problem for Labour, however, is that Balls and Miliband, aware that voters may not easily accept their distinction between “good” borrowing and “bad” borrowing, are unwilling to make the explicit case for deficit-financed stimulus. Earlier this week, George Osborne, not entirely unconvincingly, ridiculed it as “an economic policy that dares not speak its name”.
Miliband may quip that he doesn’t need to give answers until he’s in Cameron place, but if he wants to continue to attack the coalition on this territory, let alone become Prime Minister, he will need to do rather better than that.
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