Prime minister’s questions: a shouty, jeery, very occasionally useful advert for British politics. Here’s what you need to know from the latest session in POLITICO’s weekly run-through.
What they clashed about: Tax tax tax. Kemi Badenoch spied an opening as the fallout from Labour’s first budget continues. With businesses warning that a hike in their national insurance contributions will lead to job losses and higher prices, and grim news from the car industry, the new(ish) Tory leader was firmly in her free-marketeer comfort zone.
Strong start: It all seemed to be going Badenoch’s way at first. The Tory leader asked Starmer whether he would endorse Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ promise to firms this week that Labour won’t be “coming back with more borrowing or more taxes.” Starmer didn’t quite go there, trotting out the familiar, robotic campaign line that the budget is “fixing the foundations” of the economy and filling the “black hole” in the economy left by the Tories. “I’m not going to write the next five years of budgets here at this despatch box,” Starmer offered, “but we said we wouldn’t hit the pay slips of working people … We kept that promise.” Firms passing on costs may beg to differ.
Tories gonna Tory: That allowed Badenoch to do what Tories do best: stress that it’s “not government that creates growth, it is business.” She pointed to warnings from the CBI business lobby group that the “dots of the government’s policy don’t join up,” and was able to once again flag protests by farmers over inheritance tax tweaks to try to paint Starmer as out of touch with the very people his government’s tax-and-spend plan is going to clobber.
Grow up: While Starmer didn’t exactly set the house on fire, however, he was pretty successful in painting the Tories as carping from the sidelines while Labour gets on with the grown-up stuff. Badenoch gave him some help on that front.
Firstly: She referenced a 2.7 million-strong petition doing the rounds on social media demanding a fresh general election. The petition is no doubt going great guns online, but Britain’s a country of 68 million people — and asking with a straight face whether this now means Starmer should just call it quits a few months in looked a bit student politics. “She talks about a petition — we had a massive petition on July 4 in this country,” Starmer roared. “We spent years taking our party from a party of protest to a party of government. They’re hurtling in the opposite direction,” he said of the Conservatives.
The G20 is silly, actually: Badenoch also risked looking a little unserious when she accused Starmer of “hob-nobbing” in Brazil while Brits suffer. That was a nod to … the G20 summit, which, generally speaking, it’s quite important for the prime minister of the U.K. to pop along to. “I suspect on their current trajectory, they don’t know whether they will attend the G20 or not,” Starmer hit back.
Dodgy joke of the week: As she read out a warning from biscuit-maker McVitie’s about the toll of the budget, Badenoch quipped that another “ginger nut” is causing the PM problems. POLITICO thinks that was a dig at Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, who is ginger. Be right back, just starting a petition to immediately sack whichever 20-something self-described “chief of staff” wrote this.
Trickier for the PM: Is the dire news from Vauxhall, the automaker that this week announced plans to close a major factory in Luton. The firm’s owners in part pointed the finger at government rules designed to speed up the transition to electric vehicles despite stalling consumer demand. Badenoch said these were the “real world effects” of Labour’s policies, and pressed the PM on whether he’s standing by the plan to ban the sale of petrol cars by 2030 “even if more jobs will be lost.”
Clapback: Starmer said the situation in Luton is indeed “very serious.” But he came armed with a comeback. “I would remind the leader of the opposition that the EV mandates that are in issue in this particular case were actually introduced by the last government,” he noted. Badenoch pushed back by saying that actually, her team watered down the EV mandate when she was business secretary.
This was all: Very enlightening political knockabout, and no doubt of great comfort to people about to lose their jobs with Christmas looming.
Helpful backbench intervention of the week: On the week the government announced wide-ranging plans to crack down on anti-social behavior, Labour’s Sunderland Central MP Lewis Atkinson was just dying to know what the government’s wide-ranging plans to crack down on anti-social behavior are all about. The prime minister reluctantly obliged.
Spotted: The Who lead singer Roger Daltrey in the Commons public gallery.
Totally unscientific scores on the doors: Starmer 8/10 … Badenoch 7/10. Starmer just edged it this week, turning things around after a dull start to seize on two petty-sounding points from Badenoch and paint the Conservatives as whiners without a plan of their own. But Badenoch is gaining in confidence, and looks set to keep hammering Labour in the tender areas of tax and net zero in the months to come.
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