Angela Rayner and Oliver Dowden shared a tender moment today at Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions as they bade farewell to each other. This will be the last time the pair face each other across the House because the Tories are – finally – about to pick their new leader who will bring in their own deputy. ‘I will miss our exchanges, the battle of the gingers,’ joked Rayner, who got through the questions easily.
Dowden used his last session to try to pin Labour down on its planned rises to National Insurance contributions for employers. His opening question was: ‘Mr Speaker, what is the Deputy Prime Minister’s definition of working people?’ That was the question journalists asked repeatedly during the general election campaign to try to reveal the sleight of hand Labour was performing in its manifesto pledge to not raise taxes on working people. Rayner’s answer today included a joke about this being the first time she and Dowden had been in the Commons ‘since he pushed for a July election’, before adding: ‘The definition of working people are the people that the Tory party have failed for the last 14 years.’
Dowden teased Rayner that she had ‘stood on a manifesto promising not to raise taxes on working people’ but that ‘it now appears she can’t even define who working people are’. He generously offered her another go, asking whether the 5 million small business owners were ‘working people’. Rayner dodged the question, saying she didn’t know how he could keep a straight face when small businesses and working people had paid the price of the Tories crashing the economy. Dowden claimed the whole house had ‘heard the Deputy Prime Minister disregard 5 million hardworking small businesses’. He then devoted two questions to the Institute for Fiscal Studies saying that raising employer national insurance was indeed a tax on working people. For two questions, Rayner deflected. She bragged about the government’s new Employment Bill and demanded that Dowden ‘apologise for the 70-year hike in taxes that he put on working people, the crashing of the economy and the disaster that he left behind’.
It is the week before the Budget, and so Rayner was able to tell other MPs that she wasn’t going to pre-empt what the Chancellor had to say – though it was notable that she dropped a heavy hint that there may well be improvements to funding for pupils with special educational needs. But on the question of whether raising employer National Insurance contributions broke a manifesto promise, she had clearly decided to take a strategy of not answering. Maybe she wants to leave that to Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer next week. If they don’t answer, though, that doesn’t mean the questions will stop: they will in fact grow.
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