Throwing money away. That was the big topic at PMQs today. Rishi Sunak has flown to Washington for talks with Joe Biden, (which is probably the President’s only scheduled appointment this month.) The deputies slugged it out in the Commons. Angela Rayner brought up an admission by the Public Accounts Committee that a fortune in tax-payers’ money has flown out of the window. A total of £21 billion is missing, presumed stolen. Rishi’s understudy, Oliver Dowden, claimed that things weren’t that bad because a quarter of the lost money would be found.
‘We’re working tirelessly to recover those funds,’ he said. Tirelessly? He sound like a bored rescue-worker tackling a house-fire with a water-pistol.
Here’s the bottom-line. The Tories have waved bye-bye to £15.25 billion of our money. And no wonder YouTube is full of videos teaching people how to get rich, perfectly legally, by winning UK government contracts. Rayner asked him again about Tory profligacy.
Dowden: ‘We’re actually putting more resources throughout this year to tackle fraud and error. And we continue to make real progress.’
‘Real progress’ is transferring £15 billion to crooks.
Crunching through the gears, Dowden pulled off a scrappy handbrake-turn and mentioned another notorious waste of cash. Rayner’s expenses claim for ‘noise-cancelling headphones.’ And he made a wisecrack about the need for ear-defenders at meetings of the shadow cabinet. A foreseeable gag. He followed that up with a quip about the lack of communication between Rayner and Sir Keir Starmer. Easy laughs there. But it’s not a wise line of attack. It concedes that the condition of Labour’s high command matters, and that power is drifting their way.
Ronnie Cowan of the SNP suggested another way to blow money earned by other people. He wants to cripple the country with a ‘universal basic income’, although he spins it as ‘providing a less precarious future for the next generation.’ He’ll turn every youngster into a lifelong trustafarian battening on the working-class. And the working-class will vanish if inactivity becomes a smart career move.
This must be the largest plea for cash ever submitted on the floor of the Commons
Ed Davey, of the Lib Dems, wrung the hearts of the Commons, with a tale of misery and sacrifice. The misery was experienced by a woman called Karen, a constituent of Sir Ed’s, who had to endure his company for an undisclosed length of time. This unfortunate woman told him ‘how hard it is to get people with power to listen to her.’ Had Sir Ed duped her by posing as someone ‘with power’? He detailed Karen’s circumstances. She cares for her husband, Alan, who suffers from an incurable disability but she ‘feels that her caring work isn’t valued and she wants to give up.’ That seemed pretty strange. Sir Ed may have twisted her words but he gave the impression that she was ready to abandon Alan unless her ‘caring work’ was ‘valued’. And ‘valued’ sounded like code for ‘paid’. And so it turned out. Sir Ed asked the Deputy PM to ‘recognise’ the work of Karen and her fellow carers by ‘giving them the financial and practical support they deserve.’ Translation: put all voluntary carers on the NHS payroll. Perhaps this is now Lib Dem policy. Helpfully Sir Ed costed his proposal, although he did so in reverse, by indicating how much is saved by not paying carers. ‘More than the entire NHS budget,’ he said. Therefore to fund Sir Ed’s promise the budget of the NHS will have to double. At a stroke, £180 billion will be added to government expenditure. Sir Ed is a record-breaker. This must be the largest plea for cash ever submitted on the floor of the Commons.
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