Corbyn’s PMQ’s strategy is now clear. Hopeful emailers send their lifestyle details to Labour HQ and a computer sifts the figures to find the voter likeliest to cause the prime minister’s cheeks to blush purple with shame. Today’s lucky winner was Kelly, (no surname given), a single mum on £7.20 per hour who works for 40 hours a week while caring for a disabled sprog.
Did the prime minister know how much the tax credit deductions will cost her?
Cameron hadn’t a clue so he talked about the rising minimum wage and falling council rents. Corbyn gave the answer: Kelly loses £1,800 a year.
The question assumes that we all live in a dysfunctional boot-camp run by Whitehall. Our income, our working hours, our educational level – and even our ability to find a mate who doesn’t walk out – are fixed by functionaries of the state.
Cameron accepted this assumption without demur. Perhaps he enjoys feeling the master of everyone’s fate.
Corbyn lobbed a second shame-bomb. Middle-class Matthew emailed to say that he earns a decent salary but still can’t afford £450k for a London starter-flat. ‘You’re the reason God invented suburbs,’ seemed the honest reply. But Cameron offered one of his daftest answers ever. He looked forward to the day when the price of a London flat would sink to £150k. That’s a two-thirds collapse in the housing-market. Hardly compatible with his ‘strong, stable economy’. Better if he confessed to impotence rather than pretended to omnipotence. No one can help the fact that rich outsiders are causing London to boom and the boom is causing poor Londoners to leave.
The SNP’s Angus Robertson has it in his head he’s at the UN Security Council. He stood up and enumerated Cameron’s military blunders starting with Afghanistan and passing to Iraq via Libya. All these interventions had gone badly wrong, pontificated Robertson in a slow and orotund manner, as if CNN were about to cut live to him at any moment. His lecture was halted by the Speaker in case it spilled over into the One O’Clock News.
Then we discovered why Cameron had taken Corbyn’s victims so seriously. Cheryl Gillan mentioned a brave young constituent, named Archie, who suffers from a rare form of muscular dystrophy and who works tirelessly for his fellow patients. What a coincidence. The PM knows him, recalls him, and admires his ‘fantastic campaigning spirit.’ He hoped that Archie might persuade Big Pharma to cut the prices of their most effective treatments.
So the clash of victims was complete. We don’t yet know what disability Kelly’s child suffers from but it seems grotesque that two sick nippers are being forced to compete in a test of virtue between the party leaders. It was like a medieval battle with expendable dwarves being hurled at opposing armies from clunky great wooden catapaults.
Let’s hope these kids remain in good health. But eventually – it’s only a matter of time – one will fall seriously ill. And the PM will be held responsible.
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