You’re an ambitious backbench Labour MP with a weighty constituency caseload, legislation that you’re interested in improving, and a few personal campaigns to right various wrongs and make the world a better place. You get a spot on the order paper for this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions. What could you possibly ask your party leader about? One of the above? For some of the Labour MPs in today’s session, the very best questions they could come up with were ones merely asking Keir Starmer if he agreed he was doing a good job.
The utterly pointless question was a regular feature at Prime Minister’s Questions when the Tories were in power
The first pointless question came early in the session from Olivia Bailey. She asked: ‘I welcome the swift and decisive action this government are taking to secure our borders after the Conservatives lost control. In particular, I welcome the world-first deal struck with Iraq last week to tackle smuggling gangs. Does the Prime Minister agree that international co-operation, shared intelligence and joint law enforcement are the best way to end the vile smuggling trade?’
What is Starmer going to say other than ‘yes’? He replied that ‘she is absolutely right’ and listed all the things he was doing well on immigration. That cannot be the only question that Bailey’s Reading West and Mid Berkshire constituents are asking at the moment. It’s barely even a question: if she really wanted to get to the bottom of what the government was doing to ‘secure our borders’, then she could have asked for further details of a particular policy, or for reassurances that Starmer was committed to realising a particular target in order to hold him to account later. There is nothing wrong with a question that attacks the other side – PMQs is a team sport – but it cannot be the sum total of what the MP is asking. There is also nothing wrong with a relatively soft question where a Prime Minister is asked to congratulate a group of campaigners, as with Carolyn Harris’s offering on her own Christmas single, which is raising money for food hampers in south Wales. But asking whether the Prime Minister agrees with you that he’s doing a good job is a total waste of time. It does not even, as many Tory MPs who brown-nosed their various prime ministers on a weekly basis found out, mean you will be more likely to get a job in government.
You don’t need to attack your own party to ask a decent question at Prime Minister’s Questions, but attacking another government is an easy way of wasting time, as Richard Baker did at the end of the session. He asked:
‘Does the Prime Minister share my concern at a report by Audit Scotland, which has found that the Scottish government have no clear plan for the NHS in Scotland? As a Scottish Labour MP, I am delighted that this government are providing £4.9 billion extra for public services in Scotland. Is it not time for SNP ministers to get a grip and do better for patients in my constituency, who face some of the longest waiting times for surgery in Scotland?’
What other answer is Starmer going to give than the one he did, that the Scottish government has ‘no more excuses for poor delivery’? Again, it would have taken only a little more effort for Baker to ask about something that was a reserved matter or that Starmer had any bearing over at all.
The utterly pointless question was a regular feature at Prime Minister’s Questions when the Tories were in power, and I documented many of the worst offenders on the Conservative backbenches on a weekly basis. Some of them would get in touch to explain why their questions were, in fact, very good, and their Labour successors are welcome to do so this time around too. But it is worth pointing out that on this, and many other aspects of the business of politics, Labour has brought absolutely no change at all.
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