A bizarre exercise in diplomacy from Jeremy Corbyn at PMQs. He manoeuvred the PM into a tricky corner and then stepped gallantly in to disperse the trouble he’d arranged. She’d been caught violating a manifesto commitment to protect school funding. The statistics proved it too. Corbyn’s back-room elves had devised a clever way to summarise the difficulty. Averaging out the cuts will mean, in effect, that every primary school loses two teachers and every secondary loses six. It was good stuff. Danger for the PM. But Corbyn, for some unfathomable reason, decided not to pursue his advantage and he proceeded to flannel his way out of his opponent’s problem. He dithered and waffled and found himself stranded in one of his platform speeches. As platform speeches go, it wasn’t bad. It was terrible. Tone, pace, construction, delivery, emotional register – all embarrassingly poor.
Working his political oui-ja board Corbyn summoned a personality called ‘Eileen’ whom he called ‘one of our many hard-working teachers who cares for her kids’. There’s an interesting trick at work here. Corbyn identifies his witnesses by their first name only because this infantilises them and makes their plight seem a bit sadder. It’s a ploy favoured by charities when they attach a westernised forename to a pleading third-world face in order to raise cash for their chief executive’s annual bonus.
‘Eileen’, according to the Labour leader, knows of teachers who use their own money to buy class-room glue. Some will regard this as a shocking discovery. Britain’s teachers, with their Rolls Royce minds and unparalleled access to research materials, must realise that glue is among the most overpriced products in the retail sector. Buy glue? No. You mix flour and water and there it is. Glue. Someone should drop the teaching unions a line.
‘Eileen’ was also worried that volunteers are contributing to school budgets. Wagging a bony finger at the Tories, Corbyn snarled that ‘a generation of young people’ have been betrayed, and that ‘fund-raising events’ have ‘quadrupled.’ This seems an odd source of grievance. When MPs lay on a tug-of-war for charity it’s a lark. When teachers and parents hold a jumble-sale it’s a stain on the nation’s honour. The summer fayre is being turned into a political weapon. The coconut shy and the lucky dip have been subsumed into the left’s critique of Tory malice. That sherry you won in the school raffle is evidence of child neglect. The teddy tombola represents an act of treachery that can never be expiated.
Brexit-wrecker Angus Robertson was in predictable form today. His complaint – that the Scots are being silenced – was puzzling even on its own terms. He listed the assemblies that will ratify the final deal: the House of Commons (where Scotland is represented), the House of Lords, (where Scotland is represented), and the European parliament. (where Scotland is represented). Where oh where, he wailed, is Scotland being represented?
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