The Commons is pretty quiet at the moment, draining of energy earlier and earlier in the week as MPs head out to their constituencies. So quiet, in fact, that Labour seems to have given up on using departmental question times as a forum for making government ministers uncomfortable or piling any political pressure on their opposite numbers.
Yesterday’s Work and Pensions Questions were pretty lacklustre from an opposition attack point of view, but today’s Treasury questions were far worse. Tory MPs had turned up with piles of sickly sweet loyal questions to ask, most running along the lines of ‘is the Chancellor aware that he’s doing a fantastic job?’ The minister responding then rewarded the most loyal backbenchers by describing them as a ‘champion’ of business in their constituency, which the Labour frontbench found very amusing until their own Steve McCabe started talking about the ‘long-term economic plan’, which earned him the same title.
It is to be expected that Tory backbenchers appear incredibly loyal and thrilled with everything that their party is doing in government when it is 100 days until the election. But it should also surely be expected that Labour’s Treasury team might be rather geared up for a proper fight on the economy.
But it wasn’t. Ed Balls opened his questions by saying he was starting on a ‘note of consensus’, asking about funding for a Holocaust memorial, but ending with the question ‘will working people be better off than they were when he became Chancellor or will they be worse off?’
Osborne continued with the note of consensus, but also moved on to the GDP figures that Ed Balls was referring to, saying ‘If the Speaker will allow me to have a slight change of tone for a couple of seconds’, before responding the Shadow Chancellor’s point:
‘For the Shadow Chancellor to complain about the GDP numbers, what the GDP numbers show is that Britain has had the fastest growing major economy in the world in 2014.’
The Chancellor then teased Balls with the praise the Tories had received from the IMF and the White House. The Labour frontbencher replied:
‘If things were really going fine and the economy was fixed then people would be better off and they are worse off and he would have balanced the books as he promised which he has completely failed to do. It’s because Mr Speaker of that failure on the deficit.’
He reeled off descriptions of the Tory economic plan as ‘colossal’ by the IFS, and referred again to the 1930s. But Osborne responded by teasing Labour again about its funding plans for its NHS policy, then teasing Balls about reports he would be sidelined from the Labour general election campaign. Then after Osborne said he was extending the ‘hand of friendship’ across the despatch box to promise to make Balls the centre of the election campaign, the session moved on. And that was it. Balls hadn’t asked any questions that Osborne really had to answer, he just offered some vague descriptions of the direction of the Tory economic plan which gave the Chancellor the chance to offer his own scripted answers, rather than struggle to explain how he felt he had a long-term economic plan when he had failed to meet his own targets.
The Labour benches were eerily empty today, as well as being eerily silent. Those who failed to turn up missed only their own frontbench failing to turn up for work for a second day running.
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