Key points
Both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn pay tribute to victims of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh and condemn the attack.
Corbyn says if he were a prison governor, a headteacher or a council leader, he would not be celebrating the budget. He asks: is that analysis wrong? (He was using a quote from Paul Johnson, the head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.)
May says austerity is ending. She says that means bringing debt down and putting more into public services. She says the budget shows the NHS spending rise is fully funded, without taxes having to go up.
Corbyn says unprotected departments will lose more than £4bn. Why did the government not find a single penny for community policing in the budget?
May says there was extra money for counter-terrorism in the budget and then accuses Labour of proposing a 10% cut in police budgets in 2010.
Corbyn quotes the Police Federation as saying the government has shown contempt for the police. He then asks whether the extra money for education will really be enough to help schools?
May says more money will go into schools next year. Per pupil funding will be protected. She is taking the country forward. Labour would take the country back.
Corbyn talks of Sasha, a parent, who says many schools are asking pupils for funds. Why did the government bring forward a tax cut for higher earners instead of ending the benefit freeze?
May says the government has put more money into universal credit but then tells Corbyn his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, said on Tuesday he would support the government’s tax cuts and said they wouldaffect middle-earners, like headteachers. Will Corbyn support the budget? That generates a lot of jeering.
Corbyn says the benefit freeze takes £1.5bn from 10m low and middle income households. A low-income family will be £200 worse off. Labour policy is to raise taxes for the top 5% and corporations. That would be a fair way of proceeding. Will May confirm there are more benefit cuts to come?
May says 2.4 million people will benefit by £630 a year from the changes to universal credit. She says the government is helping people on low incomes, for example from the fuel duty cut. She says if Corbyn wants to help working people, he should vote for the Conservative budget.
Corbyn says he does not know whether that was a yes or a no to his question. May used to be concerned about burning injustices. That has fizzled out, he says. He says those on low incomes will be worse off as a result of this budget. Only Labour can be trusted to end austerity. Councils, schools, police, prisons, public sector workers and those reliant on social security will face years more of austerity. May promised to end austerity. Will she apologise for failing to do that?
May says Corbyn questioned her commitment to tackling burning injustices. What about the Modern Slavery Act? Stopping people with mental health conditions being held in jail? The race equality audit? Unemployment is down. Labour want to know what’s gone up. She will tell them. Support for public services? Up. Growth? Up.
Snap verdict
That sounded like a high-score draw; May and Corbyn were both on form, and they will probably both head off for lunch chalking that up as a success. May’s line taunting Corbyn for saying in the past that the extra money for the NHS would require tax increases when it didn’t in this budget (but only because the OBR’s better-than-expected forecasts magicked up some extra money – which may well disappear as forecasts get revised in the years ahead) was effective, and she milked Labour’s confusion about whether or not it backs tax cuts for higher-rate payers for all it was worth. Tory MPs liked her performance, and their cheers at the end were the loudest May has heard for some time.
But if May was hoping to properly up-end Corbyn over the tax issue, she failed. He brushed aside her attack relatively easily (largely by ignoring it), and his own questions were pertinent and powerful. May did not even try to answer his question about welfare cuts, and his point about community policing was particularly effective. It is a sign of how much Corbyn has evolved as a leader that he can now stand at the dispatch box championing more spending for the police, and no one thinks he sounds inauthentic (because he doesn’t). Today he never quite managed to deliver a knockout blow, but the very fact that he held May to a draw only two days after the government unveiled the highest-spending budget for a decade or more probably counts as a win of sorts.
Memorable lines
Jeremy Corbyn:
Can the prime minister explain why she chose not to end the benefit freeze for 10m households but instead brought forward a tax cut for higher earners?
Theresa May on Corbyn raising tax cuts:
On Monday, he said that cutting taxes for 32 million people was frittering money away on ideological tax cuts. Yesterday, the shadow chancellor said Labour would support the tax cuts. On Monday, [he] talked about tax cuts for the rich, yesterday his shadow chancellor said what we’ve always known, that the tax cuts were for middle earners, teachers and people like that.
