Labour had an aggressive session at Work and Pensions Questions today, attacking the Conservatives on disability benefit cuts, and on whether they had any morals. Normally questions in the Commons are supposed to be about the design of policies, but today Owen Smith appeared to be taking a leaf out of Jeremy Corbyn’s book, asking a question he had crowdsourced:
‘Before I came here this afternoon, Mr Speaker, I asked disabled people what question they would like to put to the Secretary of State and one answer stood out and it was quite simply: how does he sleep at night?’
Funnily enough, Iain Duncan Smith didn’t supply any details of his sleep patterns. Other Labour MPs chipped in with questions criticising the cut to personal independence payment, with Debbie Abrahams saying the government had reached a ‘new low’, adding that it was a ‘dodgy, inept and unjust government’.
Did the session leave Duncan Smith in any difficulty? Well, the campaign from Labour may be noisy and personal, but it will only become powerful when Conservative backbenchers join in. And they certainly didn’t do that today, mostly asking anodyne questions about whether the minister would agree with them that the local charity in their constituency was doing important work when it came to getting people back into work, or inviting the minister to open one of their jobs fairs. The phrases ‘jobs fair’ and ‘will the minister agree with me’ are almost always an indication that the MP in question is trying to help the government out by padding the session with lovely points about the importance of motherhood and apple pie, rather than asking anything about the design or delivery of a policy. Understandable, perhaps, when a frontbench is under such partisan attack from the party opposite, but not a particularly good use of the time, which is officially set aside for scrutiny. But it’s not clear what is a greater waste of time: asking someone a question they can easily avoid about how they sleep, or banging on about jobs fairs.
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