Any session of Prime Minister’s Questions that takes place before a fiscal event is merely a warm-up act that everyone forgets within seconds, but today Keir Starmer made that warm-up a bit more closely connected to the Spring Statement by insisting to the chamber that ‘I have full confidence in the Chancellor’. He was answering a question from Conservative MP Jerome Mayhew, who claimed that Rachel Reeves’s ‘plans have collapsed around her ears with an emergency budget to cut that spending’.
Kemi Badenoch, though, gave a nod to the Spring Statement, before focusing her questions on education. She did so in her characteristically unorthodox manner, and this time, it didn’t quite work. The Tory leader started off with a question about banning phones in schools, presumably because it was a tangible policy issue that gets people’s attention immediately. She wanted to know why Labour MPs had voted against a ban on phones in schools last week. Starmer replied that this was ‘completely unnecessary’ as most schools had already banned phones, and that it was more important to focus on the content that children shouldn’t be accessing.
Badenoch, though, pursued her original point about banning phones. She stuck to it for the next few questions, complaining that phones were disrupting GCSE classes. From this, she pivoted to pointing out all the policies that the Labour government had cancelled on behaviour and forced academisation. She also complained about school funding shortfalls, which probably sounded rather hollow given the regular complaints from schools about their funding under the Conservatives. Starmer gave the same answer he has offered for the past few weeks, which was that Badenoch wasn’t saying how she was going to pay for anything she was demanding. He also offered an odd line on forced academisation for failing schools, saying: ‘The vast majority of schools are already academies. Therefore, we need to think again about what we do about failing schools that are already academies.’ That is not really the issue that the policy is addressing, and it was an odd way of deflecting the point.
There were some interesting questions from the backbenches, including opposition MPs asking once again for assurances that hospices will be exempted from the national insurance rise (they won’t, and Starmer talked instead about support for those institutions). Kim Leadbeater also asked whether the government would implement her assisted dying legislation quickly if it was passed by the house. The Prime Minister’s answer probably wasn’t quite what she was looking for. He said: ‘It is the government’s role to ensure every piece of legislation that passes through parliament is effective and workable. So we will continue to work with my honourable friend as the bill sponsor to do that in the same way we would for every private members’ bill which passes second reading, and if parliament chooses to pass this bill, the government will implement it in a way that is safe and practicable.’ Those last few words could allow quite a delay if necessary.
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