Even though they ended up walking through the lobbies together (though not hand in hand, skipping, sadly), Ed Balls and George Osborne still managed to have the sort of Commons showdown that would fit right in to the script of Bridget Jones. On and on their furious fighting went, over whether the long-term economic plan was working, over whether Labour had a long-term economic plan, over whether Britain would get its AAA credit rating back, over whether Balls would borrow more and whether Osborne was cutting the deficit slower than he’d intended. On and on and on. Both looked as though they were enjoying tearing chunks out of one another before agreeing with each other on paper.
Labour thinks that today’s exercise – voting with the government on the Charter for Budget Responsibility – is largely pointless. A gimmick, Ed Miliband called it. And indeed, it might seem that given the party did vote with the government on the motion this evening, it has avoided the trap that George Osborne was setting it, which was for it to refuse to back the Tory line on spending. But the vote is still awkward for Labour as it allows the parties to its left to say that Labour is now officially signed up to Tory austerity. Indeed, the SNP had a lot of fun with the motion today, and Pete Wishart announced threateningly on Twitter that he would be ‘publishing’ the names of the Scottish Labour MPs who walked through the lobbies with the Conservatives, as though they weren’t available in Hansard anyway. Osborne taunted Labour, saying:
‘It is a totally chaotic and farcical position from the Labour party. It has spent the first two weeks of this year complaining that the Conservative party is cutting too much and promising that it would not cut as much, but now Labour members are going to troop through the Division Lobby with us in support of a Charter that requires £30 billion of fiscal consolidation over the next couple of years. To be fair to the Scottish National party, I think its members are going to vote against us, as too is the Green party, but Labour members are sitting there in total silence. They are going to go through the Division Lobby with us to support £30 billion of spending cuts. Cheer up, it is what the Labour frontbench team has asked you to do. It is going to lead the party through the Division Lobby because it does not want to admit to the British people that its plans involve spending more money.’
We’ll have plenty more street fights between George Osborne and Ed Balls before the general election. But Labour knows it also needs to work out how to fight the SNP and the Greens without feeding the Conservative line that it is fiscally incontinent.
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