Towards the end of the Chancellor’s budget, Keir Starmer’s internal pressure gauges were running hot. He was pumping himself up for what might be the biggest speech of his leadership – his address in reply to an election-year Budget. Jeremy Hunt had caused several bursts of uproar, the House had been fluffed to a point just shy of climax. The atmosphere was dense, Keir was to be the thunderclap – and then the SNP spoiled everything.
The Chair read out a formal Motion designed to authorise any announced taxes that were to have immediate effect (there never are any). All those in favour? (Roar) All those against? (As loud a roar where there is always silence).
Eleanor Laing patiently explained to the claymore-waving clans below the gangway that this was a formality, it was a provisional motion, it was a preliminary motion, it was never voted on. The real Motion would be voted on next Tuesday and that a division now would be pointless before the Leader of the Opposition’s reply to the Chancellor – and so, she re-ran the question.
All those against? The SNP roared again: Nooooo! (with base notes of See You Next Tuesday).
Division!
These things take 20 minutes. The narrative of the debate collapses. The mood of the House evaporates. The drama is derailed. The SNP had read the rule book, identified Standing Order 51 and were quite entitled – and highly motivated – to ruin the Labour leader’s big moment. It was his fault the House hadn’t been allowed to vote on their Gaza amendment, so the House would be forced to vote on the Provisional Collection of Taxes Act (1968) and wreck his moment in the spotlight.
No wonder Scotland has such dental problems, this sort of revenge is very sweet.
In the previous PMQs, Stephen Flynn confessed – and I’m not sure he quite realised it – that Scotland was now a victim of Tam Dalyell’s West Lothian Question (that following devolution, Scottish MPs in Parliament could vote on English education but the English couldn’t vote on Scottish).
In a pleasing inversion of that, the leader of the SNP lamented that Westminster was taxing Scottish energy resources in order to pay for English tax cuts.
He is right. It is one of the advantages of being a colonial overlord, and a small recompense for shouldering the burden of that resentful outpost of humanity – once the home of Mill, Smith and Enlightenment.
Rishi had just been laying out the realities of and some of the reasons for our own sad national decline (it’s a steepening of our previous sad national decline, with added decline).
He lamented, for instance, the presence of violent rapists and other sex criminals working their way up the police forces. Rishi was able to announce a rather brilliant detective innovation – the police were now undertaking to check what criminal records serving policemen currently had. Apparently when people commit sex crimes, it gets written down somewhere, and now the police have discovered where those records are kept and are in the process of looking at them. Rape is actually contrary to the police service’s Code of Conduct, that’s how they know they shouldn’t be doing it.
This didn’t satisfy Keir Starmer. “I’m familiar with Codes,” he said and got the first good laugh of the session. He was not pleased. “This is too serious a matter for that,” he said. “There is a world of difference between a code and binding standards.” That got an even better laugh.
Keir was the Director of Public Prosecutions, the PM pointed out, when rape went virtually unpunished. Now a full 2.4% of rape trials today happen within a year of the crime being committed. It doesn’t sound a very high number, looked at in cool reflection.
Why that is so is a great mystery but some light on it was shed from another question. A Tory asserted that organising alliances to counter the threat of apocalyptic nuclear war with Russia was very difficult and slow and constantly stalling. Rishi told the Commons they were looking at “how we can unblock the bureaucracy” that is preventing meaningful action.
We will be looking at that from the ashes of our smouldering offices, as we crackle with radioactivity. Never mind democracy, or whatever is said in the the Chamber, we are actually governed by that blocked bureaucracy.
So, when Jeremy Hunt announced a plan to revolutionise the NHS, to drive productivity dizzyingly up to 1.9% a year (the head of the NHS has promised to do that, in return for a multi-billion pound funding rush), some of us remembered Rishi’s words and wondered what erematic extravagance would be deployed to unblock the calcified monster.
It’s all to do with apps and AI, it seems. The NHS is going to be “the most digitally integrated health service in the world.” Keir pointed out in his turn that Jeremy Hunt as Minister of Health had promised “a paperless NHS by 2018.” That made his party very happy. But on a serious note – remembering the computerised “Spine” that was going to digitise all patient records in the early 2000s (it was a forerunner of HS2 in that it cost £12 billion and was never built), an exciting opportunity is being offered to the public. Find the companies with the contracts to deliver this NHS revolution and buy, buy, buy their shares. And don’t get cancer because a share spike is the only positive way to make a killing out of the NHS.
As Budgets go, Chancellor Hunt put on a pretty good show for such a nice young man. He had an attractive rabbit in the form of a cut in the “tax on jobs”. Who knows he might suggest abolishing it altogether in their manifesto. There was also the new Treasury financing model based on the idea of claiming future spending reductions by preventive spending now. That could have got a good laugh, and may yet do. He also caused a very decent uproar half a dozen times,
“Lower taxes means higher growth.” went down so well with Labour that he used the line again in different forms. That Conservatives understand how lower taxes release economic energy which is why they were lowering taxes (uproar). That Conservative “governments bring taxes down” (uproar). That Rachel Reeves’ “thespian skills had her “acting like a Tory but we all know how that ends – with higher taxes!” Enormous uproar.
The biggest uproar he caused was by pulling Angela Rayner’s leg about her difficulties in the rental property market (Guido passim). Whatever he said, it caused Ms Rayner to flare up magnificently, cheeks shining, eyes blazing, fingers pointing, long red hair flowing down her front like something out of a Bob Dylan song. I hope I am old enough and sufficiently past it all to say she is a magnificent example of femininity, with all the best qualities of Queen Boadicea and the Lady of Shalott. I’m not sure Keir Starmer nor Rachel Reeves entirely agree, they quite ostentatiously ignored her.
Chancellor Hunt left us with his thought that Britain was to become the world capital of creativity, the next global SiliconE Valley, the international leader in financial innovation, the highest growth in the something or other and a place where all working people could rely on the full expensing of leased assets.
Oh, if only the Conservatives hadn’t put up taxes to the highest since World War Two! Oh, if only immigration wasn’t running at a million a year! Oh, if only they hadn’t spent £380 billion on lockdown! Oh, if only they hadn’t created the cat’s cradle of regulations and codes and directives that mean that nothing can be done – then what an election year budget speech it might have been.
Keir Starmer asked, “Honestly, what is the point of them?” And it was hard to find an immediate answer.
Tories have a special relationship with this time of year. The lazy days of summer are gone, the temperatures are beginning to bite, it’s back to work, time for tweeds, the season of country sports and the thrill of the hunt.
Was there any thrill in the Hunt we saw just now? Proper Tories will have their own reactions but for Gallery Guido the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement was crushingly autumnal. Even as he spoke, you felt the nights drawing in and a rush towards the longest night.
He announced this and that, and at each announcement one felt a little life draining away. The small business multiplier is to be frozen for another year. Class 4 National Insurance contributions are being reduced by a full percentage point.
And these details are in his power, he can affect them with his signature. Other proposals are entirely fanciful. He is going to reduce access times to the national grid by 90 per cent. Where it takes 15 years to get your wind farm connected to the grid it’s now going to take just over a year. It takes a year to get the department to answer its phone. The best of British luck with that essential little ingredient for Net Zero.
The Chancellor is also going to increase public sector productivity by 0.5% a year.
He is attempting to penetrate one of the great administrative mysteries of modern times. The NHS was recently the beneficiary of Britain’s largest fiscal settlements – a £50bn Workforce Plan. Post-pandemic they now have 10% more nurses and 15% more consultants – and yet hospital activity has fallen. And no one knows why. NHS England even refuses to admit the mystery exists. Does the Chancellor know what he’s up against?
The only reliable way he could do that is by firing 30,000 public sector workers a year which – in modern parlance – is an act of genocide.
The Chancellor finished by telling us that his new approach amounted to the biggest package of tax cuts since the 1980s. This may be so, but the achievement isn’t so remarkable when you’ve presided over the highest taxing parliament in history.
To be fair, they probably had to, to make a dent in the £300bn bill incurred by paying the nation to take a year off work – but that’s not something Labour or the Tories can ever say in public.
The PM sat behind his Chancellor with a lively face, smiling cleverly as if we should understand that the announcements were largely his idea. Odd that the puppeteer should be smaller than the puppet.
The deeply autumnal sense increased with the shadow chancellor’s reaction. We all know Rachel Reeves. Suffice it to say, she is as God made her.
If it’s springtime for Labour it’s getting very wintry for Britain.
In the preceding PMQs, MPs made efficient use of the recent media-friendly supply of dead children. The ones without political significance were used to demonstrate MPs’ human qualities. The ones in Gaza became blood donors for Stephen Flynn. He dabbled his hands in their wounds, took a draught of their suffering to lubricate his Caledonian keening. He said that a five-day ceasefire was merely a stopgap and he, the PM, was endorsing “a return to the killing of children” whereas he, Stephen Flynn, wanted “an end to the killing of children“. This miracle would be effected by taking power from the actually genocidal Hamas and given to the actually genocidal Palestinian Authority.
Yes, winter is definitely on the way.
You have to hand it to Rishi. I leave you to define the “it”. He surveys the apocalyptic comedy playing out in front of him with grace and good humour and the occasional glitch, as his clutch slips. You can’t blame him for that. He is surrounded by enemies, opponents, satirists, sociopaths, a sullen civil service and a malevolent judiciary: it’s marvellous his speaking functions function at all.
Indeed, as evidence of his resilience, he was able to reassure us that the Supreme Court had just endorsed the Rwanda plan with a couple of reservations, and that flights would be starting early next year. Or so I understood from what he said.
Keir almost managed to get out a decent joke out about Elon Musk, the reshuffle, the return of PM formerly known as Dave, the accumulating collapse of the Tory party and AI. It was a multi-dimensional affair with a punchline of “turning it off and turning it on again”. We all like that joke. Always have done. And Keir is so high in the polls he can fluff as much as he likes. He and his chancellor sat there like Easter Island statues, dreaming of the time when it will all be theirs to make a mess of, and to wave away criticism with lordly ease.
Speaking of which, there is a Spy cartoon of David Cameron on the wall of the press gallery staircase. He is looking down at a paper in his hand with amused indifference, nonchalant hand in pocket, elegant collar, upper class complexion. Actually, it’s George Curzon circa 1900 but the spirit of Eton travels through the generations. Is it worth recalling that Curzon’s prime minister, Lord Salisbury expressed the essence of Conservatism with his remark: “What do we need change for – aren’t things bad enough as they are?”
In any event, it was the stocky backbencher Kevin Brennan who won PMQs with a feline question to Rishi: “What was David Cameron’s greatest foreign policy achievement?” The word Brexit was ostentatiously unsaid. The great political disaster that caused the government to fall, for Cameron to resign and to engage in a little light lobbying on behalf of an Australian financier – all that struck Members at different times causing Commons laughter to ebb and flow in a ways that only the most successful jokes manage to do.
Several questioners accused the Government of moral failure for not demanding a ceasefire in Palestine. Blame, shame and accusations of genocide are the common coin of Middle East discourse, by its nature. And of course dead children do feature somewhere in the ethical calculation – but they are given different values by different interests, not all of them impartial. So, when Rishi called the accusation and the analysis on which it was based “naive” and “simplistic”, it sounded like a very proper response.
He might have said – but didn’t – that only one of the combatant parties has genocide explicitly written into its constitution. It’s odd how Rishi pulls his punches at the last minute. Is that why his reputation is as it is? His obituaries will doubtless make all that clear.
NB: James Cleverly sat beside the PM, displacing the Second Lord of the Treasury. He span a pen in and around his fingers in the way that cinematic villains do. Does he feel his time is coming? It may well be approaching. All he has to do is live to be 145.
He might give the new foreign Secretary a passing thought: Rex quondam, rexque futurus, as Eton says. All serious politicians consider the worst that could happen. The possibility of a second Cameron premiership would be well worth the Home Secretary bearing in mind.
“Too many notes, Mozart. Very good effort but too many notes.”
Keir Starmer was saying that the British public wanted to tell the Conservatives to “eff off” and the PM was saying, “A £100,000 mortgage locked in six months before the end with savings £350 a month with a new deal AND repossessions prohibited 12 MONTHS after the first missed payment. TWICE as generous as Labour’s!”
What administrative arpeggios he can improvise – the audience really needs a degree in public policy to appreciate our prime minister as he deserves. Keir’s adenoidal adagio rather cut through, the Alastair Campbell school of rhetoric: Eff off Prime Minister.
He had tied it to the Tory candidate at Tamworth who had gone on the record as advising beneficiaries to “f*** off,” and categorised it as “official government policy.” He called for a general election “so that the British public can return the compliment.”
With his weakness for the underdog, your correspondent is firmly on the side of the prime minister. When Keir brought up the case of Anna Lisa who had been no-fault evicted, I struggled not to heckle, “Laffer effects! It’s Laffer!”
“What other message could she possibly take?” he asked.
The correct message – and no details are necessary – is that making evictions easier will increase the supply of rental properties and thus bring rents down, making life both easier and cheaper for renters. Agreed it’s a variation on Laffer rather than the opening theme, but with time and tuition, Anna Lisa would see the logic and the beauty of it. With an intensive program of door-to-door economic one-on-ones, our country would be ready for a Tory government in – what – 150,000 years?
The House really isn’t used to this sense of impending Armageddon. It’s all too large for the language available to the Commons. The relief was palpable when a Tory asked to be reassured that Warrington would benefit from the East-West rail upgrade by getting its own high-speed sub-station linking Northern Powerhouse Rail to the West Coast mainline. The agony of rail commuters is something we can relate to. We understand the horrors of the unimproved Penistone line. We can take comfort from the PM’s reassurance that “a corridor development study” is underway.
“Saying No to hate” is what we say about wilful misgendering. Hate crimes are wearing Mexican sombreros or blackface or SS fancy dress. Being hunted by gunmen, as seen on social media, who has the imagination to encompass that?
Having said that, Keir Starmer really rather rose (or perhaps more accurately, descended) to the occasion. For the first time in your sketch writer’s experience, it was possible to feel he fully believed what he was saying. It may be that Lady Starmer has inspired in him moral clarity. Wives do have that ability, it’s true. There was no equivocation on the wickedness of Hamas, no two-sides on the “mutilations” and “slaughter”. He came flat out with things that a third to a half of his party flinched back from.
Is the soubriquet “Inaction Man” really going to last the distance? The Labour benches gave its debut a great shout of welcome just now, as though it was kicking off the general election campaign.
But is “inaction” the word that springs to mind when we think of our busy elf of a PM? He darts, he jabs, he occasionally runs rings around his opponent (“Prison escapes were 10 times higher under Labour!”) He has all the facts, most of the arguments and enough of the footwork when the facts or arguments abandon him. He is, if anything, hyperactive.
Isn’t the PM better characterised as Busily Ineffectual Man?
As Keir and others pointed out, whatever Rishi has said he’s doing about it, the small boats keep coming, violent criminals are still released early, Wandsworth prison is so dysfunctional it ought to be shut down, public buildings are crumbling with leprositic concrete, there’s no real strategy to deal with our vast opponents in the East, the national grid is in no shape to electrify our energy system, cancer waits are measured in geologic time, and HS2 is simply out of control and beyond the reach of any mortal.
The theme of Keir’s critique is: “The prime minister failed to heed the warnings and is desperately playing catch-up.”
There may be some truth in this.
The fact is, we’re going through a cultural change that politics is powerless to affect. The great public services are making unilateral declarations of independence and are fighting to the death (mainly our deaths) for more money, more time off, less supervision, and no neo-colonial, quasi-fascist directives to turn up at the office.
No matter how active our leaders are, they can’t make these people, these public servants, do anything they don’t want to. Keir will be just as a great an example of uselessness, as and when his time comes.
Towards the end of PMQs we had some delicate indications of Rishi’s new thinking around the single greatest issue for the West – that is, climate change. Both sides agree on its apocalyptic potential. One side sees humanity being incinerated in an atmospheric bonfire – and the sensible, conservative side sees the destruction of western capitalism and the collapse into anarchy, poverty and extinction of the most successful culture in world history.
What side is Rishi on? While he lets us know he is passionately committed to Net Zero, he claims to be committed to allowing people to do what they want. When asked whether he was about to “ignore his climate advisers” and allow the expansion of Luton airport. He said, “My approach to Net Zero is not one that requires people to give up things they enjoy doing”.
That feels a little undercooked for a Sunak analysis. The lack of detail suggests a lack of thought. And if he hasn’t thought it through, the machinery already in place will continue to grind away, producing ever-greater restrictions, prohibitions and costs.
He can’t allow it to do so. If he does, it will result in the greatest apocalypse that Westminster can imaginatively encompass: everyone will lose their seat.
