After last week’s massacre, David Cameron arrived better armed at today’s PMQs (or energy questions as it will surely soon be retitled). He sought to unsettle Ed Miliband by quipping that the Labour leader had adopted “Tory policy” by switching suppliers and cleverly framed the party’s decarbonisation target as a “price rise”. In an acknowledgment that the PM had raised his game, the Tory benches roared him on.
But against Cameron’s assault (rarely has he sounded more furious), Miliband’s price freeze remains a powerful shield. Every time that Cameron attempts to change the subject, he can reply ‘why don’t you support our policy?’ The PM’s stock response that it is a “price con” still fails to convince. After Cameron’s reference to him changing suppliers, an unfazed Miliband replied: “The only thing people need to hear is, if they want someone to stand up to the energy companies, they need to switch the Prime Minister.”
Midway through the session, he revealed how Labour intends to put Cameron on the spot by challenging him to amend the Energy Bill to introduce a price freeze. Borrowing the trick regularly used by George Osborne on welfare, I expect Labour to introduce its own amendment and challenge the Tories and the Lib Dems to vote it down.
Confronted by Miliband’s “cost of living” offensive, Cameron’s instinct remains to shift the debate back to the macroecnomy. He boasted that the UK was forecast to grow “almost three times as fast as Germany” and declared that Miliband was “hiding behind this economically illiterate policy because he can’t talk about the economy”. But Cameron should be wary of relying this line of attack. To most voters, after all, living standards are the economy.
In a sign of his frustration at the political success of the policy, the PM derided Miliband as a “one trick pony” (an attack line that Labour will look to prove wrong next week with a major speech from Miliband on wages), but as the Tories are learning to their cost, there is a lot of life left in this trick yet.
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