PMQs this week was a rather more even affair than usual. Since the Budget, the Labour leader’s team have clearly spent some time reading the Tory manifesto. Jeremy Corbyn came to the chamber armed with some decent questions about how proposed changes to the national funding formula broke the Tory manifesto pledge to protect the money that followed your child to school. This was a clever subject to go on as the Tory backbenches are not happy about this proposed new national funding formula.
In response, May kept pointing out that the issue of school funding was one that has been ducked for years by government despite a general acknowledgement that the current model is flawed. But she also emphasised that this is just a consultation—which is Westminster code for: these proposals won’t be implemented in their current form.
As May tried to reassert control, she took a swing at Labour frontbenchers for criticising grammars but then sending their children to either grammar schools or private schools. This drew lusty Tory cheers in the chamber. But I suspect that there will be quite a few people on the Tory frontbench who won’t be enthusiastic about children being brought into politics in this manner.
Angus Robertson, unsurprisingly, asked about Brexit and Scotland. May had one good line in response—pointing out that she is respecting the result of the 2014 and 2016 referendums, while the SNP is respecting neither—but it was disappointing that she didn’t, again, point out why holding a referendum in the near future would be unfair on Scottish voters. They wouldn’t know either what the UK’s relationship with the EU will be or on what terms an independent Scotland would deal with the EU.
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