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.
Reasonable people disagree on the category Tory Story IV falls into. Some say it’s a tragic farce – others incline to farcical tragedy. It’s hard to distinguish which is what and where anyone is. In post-modern terms it’s not a mess it’s a mash-up. Sir Keir added to the whirligig this afternoon, mashing with the best of us after his weekend exertions sucking up the ancestral spirit of the Conservative party.
Michael Fabricant welcomed the Labour leader to the Tory inner circle as “Mrs Thatcher’s latest fanboy” (Tory delight). Stephen Flynn pointed out the PM was about to lose an election to “a fellow Thatcherite” (desperate Tory cheers). Keir laughed with his ho-ho-whole upper body – more Heath than Thatcher – but he couldn’t bring his party to the party. They faced their front, as glazed as a Terracotta Army. First Israel, now this: was there nothing their leader wouldn’t say? It’s as though he could utter the words ‘Daily Mail’ without spitting three times and throwing salt over his – Good God, he just did that as well. “Daily Mail readers” he said, without the least hint of revulsion, almost as if they weren’t the genocidal world-exterminators of a boiling planet.
If the purpose of Rwanda was “to solve a political headache of the Tories’ own making; to get people out of the country they simply couldn’t deal with – then it’s been a resounding success. After all, they’ve managed to send three home secretaries there.” The essence of humour is surprise, so when Keir makes a pretty good joke the effect triples. “So, apart from his own cabinet, how many people has he sent to Rwanda?”
The tragic farce began to unfold under Starmer’s prosecuting points. The Government was going to send tens of thousands to Africa. Then it was hundreds and now under the latest court ruling, it’s a maximum of 100 (one hundred – one). “The number of people sent there remains stubbornly consistent: zero.”
Rishi accused the opposition of a deal with France to accept 100,000 (so, a huge reduction on current numbers). But he wasn’t doing well. Starmer was – unexpectedly – hitting his stride.
“Article 19 of the Treaty says the United Kingdom shall make arrangements to resettle a proportion of Rwanda’s refugees in the United Kingdom.” (Low, moaning cries of Ohhhh! From both sides of the House). “So how many refugees from Rwanda will be coming here to the UK?” He had to raise his voice above the turbulence he had caused. The PM’s foes – for brevity’s sake, the House of Commons – were uniformly, but for different motives, delighted.
“It’s a point of pride that we are a compassionate people and welcome people from around the world,” he began, losing at once the sympathy, respect and attention of those of us paying any attention.
Starmer doubted the PM had actually read the Treaty. He must have, he is master of all detail. “Article 4 caps the scheme at Rwanda’s capacity. That’s 100. Article 5 says Rwanda can turn them away if they want. Article 19 says we have to take refugees from Rwanda. And how much did this fantastic deal cost us?“
“Annexe A says on top of the £140 million he’s already showered on Rwanda – when we send people there under this Treaty, we have to pay for their accommodation and their upkeep for five years. And anyone we send there who commits a crime can be returned to us.”
After this shellacking, Sir Keir’s successes went to his head and his questioning fell away into obscurities of football references and hermetic humour.
But he had delivered the most wounding series of questions of his leadership. The Daily Mail could not have put it better. It will have the important electoral effect of discouraging Tory supporters from supporting a confused, culturally corrupt and tragically comic government.
One of the Government’s few successes was postponing Suella Braverman’s personal statement. Normally these come directly after PMQs to a packed Chamber and the Prime Minister suffers in public. Today, the Government put in a statement on Hillsborough first, and even while that was being made, they put in another statement on Gender Recognition.
The loyalist benches were very sparsely sat upon for Suella Braverman’s personal statement. If for no other reason her remarks lacked the resonance necessary for a lethal strike at the PM.
But she’s certainly still in the game. Even the ceramic figure of Liz Truss was there, immobile in support.
When Suella talked about “young men many with values and mores at odds with our own, who’ve paid criminal gangs thousands of pounds to break into Britain”…. There was a glimpse of the genie that may or may not emerge from its long captivity.
Mrs Thatcher was the last who rubbed that lamp the right way and released the accumulated rage of a long suffering middle class. Maybe it will happen again?
She’s certainly abrasive enough but has Suella got the polishing skills to coax and entice and ultimately to summon that towering, blazing genie we in the middle classes strive to suppress in ourselves?
She was far from alone. She had 75 supporters or fellow travelers or absent-minded Tories sitting with her below the gangway. What she said, it’s not clear the Daily Mail yet dares to say. But there’s a good bet to be made that her time is yet to come.
Having said that, her grand proposition Who Governs Britain? wasn’t asked by Thatcher. When Edward Heath put that question to the country the answer came back “Not you, old cock.”
But she’s still clearly still in the game. She nearly lost her audience when she told them they’d have to sit over Christmas to pass the legislation she wanted. But there’s plenty of mischief they might yet get into.
Perhaps she and her group will side with Labour on a confidence vote on some Rwanda Bill and bring the Government down before they’ve a chance to present an election budget?
Let’s put a February election into the maelstrom of possibilities.
Those young men with values and mores at odds with ours may well have the last laugh.
By some cyber super-villainy, the parliamentary media passes were disabled today. Doors that normally opened submissively blocked and barred even the grandest of us, even the BBC. It was as though they were members of the public.
Nonetheless, we are journalists, we have our ways, we will not be denied access. Through the sewers, principally, and up through the drainpipes we swarmed the press gallery, nothing could keep us away from PMQs.
To begin with a sketch scoop – the back of Rishi’s head. Through a cleavage in that thick, pitch thatch is emerging a glimpse of scalp. We plant a flag there, to claim the territory for Guido. A patch of skull was the first sign of the pressures of office felt by David Cameron all those years ago – it is surprising, considering his circumstances, that the PM isn’t as bald as a billiard ball.
Jeremy Wright introduced his visiting 110-year-old constituent to the House and commended him to his party leader as an example of “surviving against the odds”.
Yes, thanks, mate, cheers for that, Jeremy.
Rishi had just had the ultra-loyalist John Hayes (it’s never been entirely clear to whom John is ultra-loyal) saying, “That 1.3 million migrants over a period of two years is a catastrophe for Britain is obvious to everyone apart from guilt-ridden bourgeois liberals.” He is the chair of the Tories’ Commonsense Group and it is a mark of his political ability that “everyone” agrees with what he has said, but not when he says it. He makes you search out the good points of Hamas. And Hitler, even, who had interesting ideas on opera house architecture.
Mr Commonsense asked in a commanding sort of way that the PM follow the instructions of his immigration minister “exactly”. The PM said he was grateful as always for the hon Gent’s advice – probably a more insulting response than anything James Cleverly could come up with. Rwanda was going to be designated safe by an Act of Parliament and the courts would not be able to declare the flights there illegal. Let’s see how that goes.
Sunak was making a very daring defence of his immigration record based on the importance of keeping one’s word and acting on one’s commitments and doing what one said one was going to do. A good prosecutor might have taken the PM apart bit by bit and left him naked, limbless and looking round the room for his vital organs.
Keir contented himself by saying the PM is “in lala land” and that he is “waging a one-man war on reality”.
In the event, his indolent abuse was assisted by the AV authorities in their cabin at the back because even as the PM taunted Starmer with the words, “Britain isn’t listening to him” they cut his mic off, meaning Britain wasn’t listening to either of them. Tulip Siddiq – she has the prettiest name of any MP and exemplary comic timing – quoted one of the senior cardinals in our scientific papacy who recently testified to the Covid Inquiry, “Rishi thinks, ‘Just let people die, and that’s okay.’”
Against a rising Tory hubbub she called out: “How is it that the Prime Minister is okay with people in our country dying?” Is there no end to the power of politics in the socialist world view? Their core value is “the audacity of hope”, in Barack Obama’s preposterous phrase. Conservatives are by contrast coming to the end of their struggle session in re-evaluating their politics and are starting to rally round their own core value. In this case, despair.
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?
