Unconventional as ever, Kemi Badenoch used her third ever Prime Minister’s Questions as Conservative leader to call on Keir Starmer to resign. The Tory leader was half speaking in jest, telling the Prime Minister that ‘if he wants to know what Conservatives would do, he should resign and find out’. It was her latest riposte to Starmer claiming that Badenoch’s party didn’t have a ‘clue’ what to do and kept jumping on bandwagons. That was precisely the charge being levelled at Starmer just a few months ago, while he was busy accusing the then prime minister Rishi Sunak of not answering any of his questions. Once again today, Starmer didn’t answer many questions either.
🚨 NEW: Kemi Badenoch says Keir Starmer should resign and brings up the general election petition that has received 2.5 milion signatures
— Politics UK (@PolitlcsUK) November 27, 2024
Starmer: "She talks about a petition, there was a massive petition on 4 July" #PMQs pic.twitter.com/oePvyPqIxR
The PM refused to repeat Rachel Reeves’ pledge to the CBI on Monday that she was ‘not coming back with more borrowing or more taxes’. Badenoch said rather pointedly that ‘I knowing that telling the truth to this House is important to the Prime Minister’, and demanded he repeat that pledge now to MPs.
Starmer did not. He replied:
‘We set out our position at the Budget, that was just set out, we’re fixing the foundations, we’re dealing with the £22 billion black hole that they left. I’m not going to write the next five years of budgets here at this dispatch box. We said we wouldn’t hit the pay slips of working people, we’ve passed the Budget, invested in the future and we’ve kept that promise.’
Even in dodging the question, Starmer said something that is at best highly disputed: the Office for Budget Responsibility has said that three quarters of the National Insurance hike for employers will be passed onto their staff in the form of lower real wages. That sounds quite a lot like hitting a pay slip.
Anyway, Badenoch retorted that Starmer was ‘not fixing the foundations: he’s making everything worse’. She pointed out that Starmer had refused to repeat Reeves’ pledge and then asked about falling business confidence.
Once again today, Starmer didn’t answer many questions at PMQs
The Prime Minister repeated, slightly robotically, that ‘we’re fixing the foundations’, and then deflected to talking about what Badenoch would or wouldn’t be doing on the NI rises, prompting her suggestion that he resign.
She then listed ways in which the government was contradicting itself on supporting business, and mentioned the petition calling for a general election. Starmer carried on complaining that the Conservatives ‘couldn’t decide what their position was’, and added ‘we had a massive petition on 4 July in this country’.
The pair carried on sparring like this, with Badenoch pointing out that the Tory Budget earlier this year had not led to tractors blockading the streets of Whitehall. If Starmer had been a little more fleet of foot, he might have started talking about another Budget that had far worse effects than a march of farmers: Liz Truss’s mini-Budget, which he normally quite happily dines out on. He did, though, try to blame the closure of the Vauxhall plant in Luton on the last Conservative government, which introduced the electric vehicle mandates that the van manufacturers are blaming for their woes.
When Ed Davey asked his questions, Starmer avoided giving another important answer, which was on the National Insurance hike and hospices. The Lib Dem leader pegged this to Friday’s assisted dying vote, which he is against, and argued that whatever happened, the government needed to improve palliative care in this country. His question was a bit long and garbled, though, and allowed Starmer to avoid the point about whether hospices would be exempt from that tax rise. Unusually for this government, the rest of the session was not dominated by totally pointless questions from Labour backbenchers dressing up their desire for a promotion in some convoluted and wordy way of praising the Prime Minister. But it also didn’t give Starmer a huge amount of difficulty, other than when he stumbled over his words when defending the government’s reforms to inheritance tax for agricultural property. He said:
‘Obviously it’s important to bear in mind, in a typical case, which is parents passing to a child, the threshold is £3 million – er billion – er million, and that is why, as she knows, the vast majority of farms will be totally unaffected.’
Starmer, like most of us, often tellingly trips over his words on subjects he’s not fully comfortable with, whether it be the ‘return of the sausages – hostages’ or the threshold for inheritance tax, which presumably he fluffed because he wasn’t sure if it could be that low. Still, at least he tried to answer that question, unlike many that had come before.
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