After today, Keir Starmer only has two more sessions of PMQs to get through before the year is out. Today’s session was the first since Rachel Reeves’s Budget, and the first time Kemi Badenoch has been able to question the government since then. Here are three things we learnt:
The Budget fall-out has yet to subside
It was a tricky weekend for the Prime Minister and his Chancellor, following claims that Reeves misled the public about the state of public finances after the OBR’s economic forecasts revealed they were better than widely thought. Badenoch was keen to make hay from the pair’s misfortune. She launched straight in with an attack on the PM and his Chancellor, pointing to the resignation of the head of the OBR, Richard Hughes, earlier this week, and asking Starmer whether he believes the person at the top should resign when an organisation “descends into total shambles”? Starmer replied with a tepid answer: “I was very proud to lead the party at the budget this week”.
But Badenoch kept going. “He doesn’t want to answer a question about taking responsibility because he likes blaming everyone else,” she said, “and so does the Chancellor”. She added that if Reeves was a CEO – like Hughes – she would have been fired. The Tory leader told MPs that her party has written to the Financial Conduct Authority over the events of last week, and asked Starmer whether Reeves would co-operate with any upcoming investigation. “She’s completely losing the plot,” Starmer laughed back, nervously. The government are going to need a better response than that should the FCA come knocking.
Labour has won the argument on child poverty
Labour has clearly won the argument on child poverty. Keir Starmer was keen to point out that his party has “pulled half a million children out of poverty”. In his opening question, he told MPs: “It is our moral mission to tackle poverty”. He was pushed on the two-child cap by Badenoch who pointed out the additional cost to the welfare bill. “Making the whole country poorer and destroying jobs is not how you keep children out of poverty,” Badenoch said.
On this argument, substantively at least, Labour now has the upper hand. It is far easier to paint Tory heckling in a nasty light when the government can point to concrete actions it has taken. It was a Conservative government, led by David Cameron and George Osborne, who first introduced the cap, and successive Tory administrations failed to lift it. Badenoch’s attack line – that Rachel Reeves’s announcement last week amounted to a “broken budget for people on benefits street” – paints her party in a nastier light still. Starmer was keen to land this attack. “The party opposite shamefully dragged hundreds of thousands of children into poverty and they will pay the price of that choice for the rest of their lives,” he said.
But Labour has a weak spot: and Kemi Badenoch is keen to exploit it
Even though the government has won the argument, it took them a while to get there. As the New Statesman reported last week, the seven Labour MPs who lost the whip for voting to remove the two-child cap were keen to point out that the government should have listened to them all along. Kemi Badenoch was too. “He may have taken the whip away,” Badenoch said, “but the rebels have had the last laugh”.
[Further reading: Limiting jury trials is a political choice]
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