The hypocrisy was breath-taking. The opportunism was scandalous. The lack of principle was extraordinary. All the same, it wasn’t a bad move. Ed Miliband used PMQs to attack the Tories for turning Britain’s borders into a gleaming string of electro-magnetic funfairs that attract hopefuls from across the globe.
Cameron planned to pass the buck straight back to Labour but Miliband pre-empted him with a list of specific Tory failings. A billion wasted on computers. Fifty thousand migrants vanishing into thin air. And the vow to cut incoming numbers to ‘tens of thousands’ broken spectacularly with 243,000 showing up since last autumn. That’s a new Glasgow every two years. Quite a party to pay for.
All Cameron could do was claim to have reduced numbers from their peak under Gordon Brown. In other words, ‘Labour started it. And we’re fractionally less useless than them.’ The root cause, he said, was the decision in 2004 to ask eight EU accession countries to transfer their dole queues straight to our job centres. Which is like blaming your boss from a decade ago for your work-place heroin habit.
Miliband finished with a Cameron quote delivered during a moment of euphoria, or possibly Merlot-phoria, back in 2010.
‘If we don’t deliver on our side of the bargain, vote us out,’ Cameron had said.
This cheery invitation to bash the PM in the teeth be heard many more times before May.
Labour has a new ploy to zap the immigration bug. Backbenchers have been ordered to stage mass rallies on the topic in their constituencies. Which is easier than it sounds when you remember that nowadays a ‘mass rally’ means any event where the spectators, (dogs included), outnumber the speakers. Labour’s man in Dudley, Ian Austin, has evidently enjoyed just such an encounter with his voters. He now brims with righteous fury about immigrants who receive welfare without paying taxes and who export child benefit.
How, he quailed, would the PM address this outrage?
Which was a bit bloody rich, as Cameron pointed out, given that Austin served as Gordon Brown’s chief errand-boy in the Commons at a time when Labour was virtually begging foreigners to take jobs in Britain for third world wages. Cameron charged his questioner with double standards. When Austin nuzzled close to Brown on the Treasury bench, said Cameron, he didn’t recall seeing him, ‘whispering any of those things into his ear. Although he whispered lots of other things.’
Dan Jarvis took up the issue of low wages and asked Cameron to ‘make work pay.’ Cameron responded with peculiar venom and highlighted a Labour plan to raise the minimum to £8 by 2020. Yet by then inflation will have lifted it higher.
‘Those front bench geniuses,’ he crowed, ‘spent all summer thinking of new initiatives and all they could come up with was to cut the minimum wage.’
Margaret Beckett fared better. She ticked Cameron off for ducking a question last week by referring, irrelevantly, to NHS Wales. ‘Social care in England is at breaking point,’ she said, repeating the complaint. ‘So an English answer to an English question, please.’ And she smiled viciously.
Well played. But she got no answer. Cameron fell back on a gushy quote from some NHS wonk praising our health service as God’s greatest gift to humanity. Said wonk is in fact the current CEO. So no bias or anything.
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