Rishi just put the union barons on notice. Speaking at PMQs, the Sunak confirmed the government will push ahead with much-needed anti-strike laws:
“Hard working families right now in this country are facing challenges. The Government has been reasonable. It has accepted the recommendations of a pay review body, giving pay rises in many cases higher than the private sector. But if the union leaders continue to be unreasonable then it is my duty to take action to protect the lives and livelihoods of the British public and that is why since I became Prime Minister I have been working for new tough laws to protect people from this disruption.”
David Cameron secretly watered down the laws just to court the unions into supporting Remain. The new laws will extend minimum service across the public sector, which were ditched in 2016. Starmer was clearly keen to talk about anything else…
Keir Starmer kicked off PMQs with: “Winchester College has a rifle club, a rowing club an extensive art collection and charges over £45,000 in fees. Why did he hand them £6 million this year in what his Levelling-Up secretary called “egregious state support”.
He didn’t mention that Winchester also instils in its pupils wounds that never heal. That it produces more heretics, eccentrics and suicides than any other school in the world and that its alumni are all crazed by cleverness – being either not clever enough, or so clever that their brains actually stick out of their heads. By these criteria, Rishi Sunak – our sensible prime minister – is only a Wykehamist in the sense he embodies the motto of the ancient College: Manners Makyth Money.
Starmer went on: “Just down the road in Southampton, four in every 10 pupils fail their English or Maths GCSE.” He proposed taking Winchester’s £6m “state support” and giving it to Southampton’s schools, unaware that the effect would be that five out of every 10 pupils would fail their Maths or English GCSEs.
To explain the mysterious “state subsidy“: public schools, or private schools, have charitable status and therefore don’t charge VAT on fees. Keir Starmer calls this a “handout“, and further, that Winchester had “£6 million of taxpayer’s money”. That is a true socialist’s view of who owns what.
Rishi Sunak looks at the world through an equally distorting lens. Thanks to Gove’s reforms, he said, 90% of British schools were now either ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’. These are technical terms – the former meaning ‘Not Good’ and the latter ‘Barely Adequate’. In the same lexicon, ‘World-class’ means ”Excluding India and South-East Asia’.
Proper Punch-and-Judy politics in the Chamber today. Starmer was obviously keen to make a meal of the school fee VAT policy – he must be forgetting his own private school days, how convenient – and Rishi landed a decent attack on the number of Labour MPs joining picket lines. The whole clash only lasted eleven minutes…
A solid performance from Rishi this week, batting Starmer away on economic competence and his flip-flopping on immigration…
Conservative backbenchers came out in force to attack Labour’s partisan anti-bullying campaigns at PMQs today. Rees-Mogg reminded the House of a string of cases perpetrated by the Opposition, and Lee Anderson highlighted their hounding of the Home Secretary. The lobby won’t like that…
Raab obviously not taking this briefing war lying down, as much as Rayner tried making a meal of it. At one point she even parroted Trump’s “drain the swamp” line for some reason…
