Keir Starmer had a special point to make at the very outset of Prime Minister’s Questions about the threat of tariffs from the US. He told the Commons that ‘a trade war is in nobody’s interest and the country deserves, and we will take, a calm, pragmatic approach’. He added that the government ‘will rule nothing out’.
He is, though, largely in automated response mode at PMQs these days. This is the case not just when replying to Kemi Badenoch’s questions with the same answers he gives every week, but also when taking questions from his own side. Labour backbenchers were in loyalty mode today, asking some grotesquely sycophantic questions of their leader. Along with the traditional first answer from the Prime Minister about his meetings with ministerial colleagues and others, the session now almost invariably opens with a dreadfully loyal question from a Labour MP praising their party’s ’Plan for Change’. Today that dishonour fell to John Grady, who also congratulated Starmer on his commitment to the triple lock.
Once again, it was your-mess-is-worse-than-ours stuff
Kemi Badenoch didn’t like that, pointing out that the triple lock was a Conservative policy, adding: ‘Rather than the Prime Minister congratulating himself for what we did, why don’t we talk about what he’s doing?’ She wanted to talk once again about the employers’ National Insurance tax hike, which comes in on Sunday. She said British businesses were, as a result, facing a ‘terrible choice to cut wages, put up prices, or sack their staff’.
The pair became locked in an argument about who had made a mess, like two schoolchildren trying to blame the other in front of an irate teacher. Starmer argued that the Tories blew up their own policies and then listed what the Labour government was doing to put more money in people’s pockets. Badenoch returned that ‘the only mess is the one that he made with his budget’, and argued that the ‘emergency budget last week’ had ‘fixed nothing’. Starmer read an answer that he must know by heart by now (not least because it used to be aimed at him when he was Leader of the Opposition) about Badenoch carping from the sidelines and not being able to say which policies she would reverse.
Badenoch’s best return was that she didn’t ‘agree with making people poorer’, and moved on to council tax rises and the rubbish on the streets of Birmingham. Starmer told her she should have resigned when her government was putting up council tax. He also said the government would give Birmingham council whatever support it needed, and argued that there had been more days lost to strike action under the Tories than in any year since the 1980s.
Also sticking to her well-used script, Badenoch accused him of not answering the question, saying ‘the whole house will have heard that he didn’t stay whether or not he could keep his fiscal rules’. The Prime Minister told her she was talking the country down. Once again, it was your-mess-is-worse-than-ours stuff, which made all the loyal Labour backbench questions look positively inspiring by comparison.
There were several particularly notably dreadful loyal questions. One came from Mike Tapp, who has offended in this area before and asked a similar question about how good Starmer was at standing up for Britain. The other was from Imogen Walker, who was very keen to glare at the SNP while criticising them.
For the second week running, there was a useful and difficult question from an SDLP MP for Starmer, this week from Claire Hanna. She was asking about tariffs and what Donald Trump hoped to get in return for any deal exempting Britain:
Would the Prime Minister agree with me that at a time when Big Tech has grown fat by corrupting our politics and preying on young people, that the wrong approach would be to pander to [Trump’s] bullying tactics and the tech billionaires in his imperial court by cutting the digital services tax?
Starmer replied that he would always put the national interest first and that a trade war was in nobody’s interest. He did, though, reject Ed Davey’s call for a ‘coalition of the willing’ to stand up to US tariffs, saying the Liberal Democrat leader was trying to make him take a false choice. He will nonetheless have some very difficult – if not unpleasant – choices to take this Liberation Day.
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