Education Questions in the Commons is a chance for MPs to ask questions about Education – or at least to suck up to ministers by asking them questions about what a good job they are doing. But today Nicky Morgan seemed to be talking about something that wasn’t so much tenuously related to her department as completely irrelevant. In her exchanges with Lucy Powell, the Education Secretary managed to end up talking about Europe. She said:
‘Isn’t it typical, Mr Speaker, that on that side of the House, they need to learn the lesson that the Vote Leave campaign needs to learn as well, which is that if you talk about the negatives all of the time, you’re going to find that they are self-fulfilling? And actually, if you want to set out an alternative, then you need to do that with some policy.’
Morgan is a pro-active member of the Remain campaign, and will be setting out its offer to women tomorrow. She also seems to be joining an effort on the ‘In’ side to push back against the claims from pro-Brexit colleagues that the Remain campaign is the negative one. She may also have been trying to highlight the biggest challenge for those campaigning for Leave, which is that they need to give a sense of what life outside the European Union would actually look like. This was Boris Johnson’s weakest moment in his interview on the Andrew Marr Show yesterday: he was good at explaining why he wanted to leave, but vague and rambling on what leaving would actually mean.
None of this, of course, has much to do with Education Questions. But then again if Chris Grayling is able to use his weekly slot in the Commons where he sets out the agenda for the coming weeks to complain about the tactics of the other side, perhaps it’s not too big a jump for Morgan to do the same. Which means that the Commons could become just another part of the referendum debate, especially given how little else there is for MPs to discuss.
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