In fact, Rachel Reeves looked remarkably collected and well-balanced sitting on Keir Starmer’s left today, last week’s tears banished by the prospect of yet another ineffectual assault on Labour’s economic record by Kemi Badenoch.
The Tory leader was thrown off-balance from the get-go, asking Starmer if he could rule out increases to income tax, national insurance and VAT as per Labour’s manifesto (clearly last week’s New Statesman cover story “Just Raise Tax”, which argues for that sort of radical move, caught Badenoch’s attention). But, wrong-footing Badenoch on her opening gambit, the Prime Minister simply responded: “yes”.
Badenoch never quite recovered, and fell into all her usual traps. Her attacks on council tax rises and frozen tax thresholds failed to land (someone remind the opposition leader than Jeremy Hunt planned to keep them frozen if the Tories won the last election), as did the line that the government is “dragging us back to the 1970s”. Simply put, the Conservatives can’t challenge Labour’s economic struggles when a) they are yet to find a way to detoxify their own record from the last time they were in charge and b) Badenoch can’t decide whether or not she’d reverse the very Labour policies she likes to rail against, or where she’d find the money if she did.
Keep an eye on the Tories’ attempts to turn the state pension into the next winter fuel allowance battleground, with Badenoch raging that “struggling pensioners” would now “face a retirement tax” as a result of those frozen thresholds. She did not mention that this “tax” is because the triple-lock (due to cost £15.5bn a year by 2029-30, by the way) ensures pensioners get an income boost regardless of how the economy is doing. But it’s an attack line Labour should be wary of – as the outrage over wealthy pensioners no longer receiving the universal benefit of winter fuel allowance proved.
Mostly, however, Badenoch was an irrelevance to this session – even if she did manage to rally her MPs into a chorus of “up, up, up” as she listed how things like inflation and unemployment had risen over Labour. Starmer was able to dodge her ham-fisted blows on the economy far more easily than his government will be able to dodge the economic reality: as the OBR warned this week, higher spending commitments and U-turns on cuts have meant “a substantial erosion of the UK’s capacity to respond to future shocks”.
Further spending rows are on the horizon, notably over SEND provision in schools, which several MPs brought up today. One of them was Ed Davey, who warned the government not to “strip away the rights of parents and children in some cost-cutting exercise”, and magnanimously reminded Starmer that if he wanted to get serious on the issue “then we have 72 votes to help”. A warning that viewing the weekly PMQs performance through the lens of two-party politics is no longer particularly useful.
We got other reminders of that, too. Green co-leader Adrian Ramsey (look out for a forthcoming New Statesman podcast between him and fellow leadership contender Zack Polanski) wanted to know what Starmer thought of the wealth tax idea mooted by Lord Kinnock at the weekend. Starmer responded “we can’t just tax our way to growth” – inadvertently echoing a phrase Badenoch had used on behalf of the Tories minutes before. Awkward.
And there was the (no-doubt planted) question from Labour backbencher John Slinger on the work of the Covid Corruption Commissioner, asking if Starmer agreed there should be “no place in public life for people who exploited the pandemic and defrauded the taxpayer to line their own pockets”. No prizes for guessing what might have prompted such a question, given Reform are now down to four MPs after James McMurdock suspended himself amid accusations of having taken out dodgy Covid loans (which he denies). “We will continue to go after the fraudsters, the grifters and the con artists, no matter who they are or where we find them,” Starmer replied, with a pointed look at the Reform bench, where Nigel Farage was sitting directly in front of cosy ex-Labour duo Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. (For more on what’s going on with the insurgent left, check out Megan Kenyon’s recent reporting.)
Anyway, back to PMQs, where Farage powered through audible heckles of “because they were lied to” and “will you shut up” to say people voted for Brexit because of immigration concerns and essentially accuse the PM of not being tough enough. As always, Starmer had an anti-Reform reply ready. Farage’s strategy for reducing illegal immigration, he argued, was “to stick two fingers up to your neighbours and then expect them to work with you”. “He has no interest in fixing the problem because he wants to milk and exploit it,” Starmer continued.
Later on, Starmer used another friendly question on workers’ rights to slam first Badenoch’s comments on maternity pay being “excessive” and then Farage’s pro-billionaire agenda. It’s an attack against Reform in particular that Labour is desperate to land, as Farage goes about insisting he is the real champion of the working man. Will it work? We’ve got another New Statesman podcast coming soon with exclusive polling on exactly this question. In the meantime, Starmer will have to content himself on a decent enough performance today not to overshadow the big negotiations with Emmanuel Macron today and tomorrow. And Badenoch will be trying to figure out how to avoid getting overshadowed yet again.
[See more: Britain is growing old disgracefully]
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