Beware the phrase “everyone knows”. When a consensus takes hold it is worth checking that it is soundly based. Everyone knows, for example, that the Labour government has made a terrible mess of its first year.
That means it should be simple for the leader of the opposition to embarrass the prime minister in the Commons, because all she had to do was to ask awkward questions that expose the government’s record.
Kemi Badenoch made a good start, by quoting Richard Hughes, the chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility, who said yesterday: “Higher and higher levels of taxes are … not good for growth.” She asked Keir Starmer if he agreed.
Funnily enough, he didn’t answer the question. “I tell you what’s bad for growth,” he said. “Fourteen years of Tory government.”
Lincoln Jopp, the theatrical Conservative MP, later said he could see why they were called “Prime Minister’s Questions and not Prime Minister’s Answers”.
But Badenoch ploughed on, asking Starmer for a definition of the “modest incomes” earned by “working people” that some of his ministers have implied would be exempt from tax rises. He gave a surprisingly specific answer, saying that he was working for “the sort of people who work hard but haven’t necessarily got the savings to buy their way out of problems”.
In other words, the chancellor was thinking of taxing savings – despite what Rachel Reeves said in opposition: “There are people who do have savings, who have been able to save up, and those are working people as well.” Strike one to Badenoch.
Starmer ended his answer by accusing his opponent of talking the country down, to which she responded: “I’m not talking the country down, I’m talking him down.” Strike two to Badenoch.
But that was about it. She tried to get the prime minister to admit that a tax on pension contributions would be a tax on “working people”, but he said, “I’m not going to write a Budget.”
She then asked a complicated question that I thought was absolutely fascinating, but which in the cut and thrust of adversarial debate made no sense at all. She started by saying that the Tories had an alternative to tax rises. This was a response to last week’s exchanges, when Starmer said she complained about tax rises but wanted the spending on the NHS made possible by those taxes.
He challenged her to say how else the Conservatives would pay for such investment. She didn’t answer it then, but it clearly rankled, so she said today that the alternative to tax rises is “cutting spending”. She pointed out that he had retreated from cutting the welfare bill, which had “sent a signal” to the markets and sent the cost of borrowing up.
Finally, she got to a question, which was to ask what he would be doing “over the summer to get a grip on the cost of borrowing”. The analysis was a mini economics lesson. She is quite right that the markets are nervous because they think that spending and taxes are in a never-ending upward ratchet, but the question at the end fell flat.
Given the state of the economy, and the painfulness of Reeves’s dilemma over the Budget in the autumn, it is surprising that Badenoch cannot make life a bit more difficult for Starmer. Given that “everyone knows” Labour has made a bad start in its first year, the prime minister seemed unexpectedly cheerful, as if he knows something the rest of us don’t.
The fundamental problems for Badenoch remain the same two that she has been worrying about for a week: that it was her party that left things in a terrible state, and that she doesn’t really have an alternative to Labour’s attempts to clear it up. Starmer cannot go on blaming the state of his inheritance for ever, but he can continue to ask what the Tories would do instead.
She says she would cut public spending, but the Tories were no good at that when they were in charge. When she and Starmer traded their end-of-year report cards on Labour’s first year, his list – including breakfast clubs and four, now four-and-a-half, million NHS appointments – didn’t sound too bad.
When she said “the worst is yet to come” and he responded “we’re only just getting started”, he sounded the more believable.
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