‘Mr Speaker, he loves talking about Liz Truss – why? Because he wants to hide from his economic record.’ Kemi Badenoch didn’t need to do much guesswork ahead of today’s Prime Minister’s Questions: she knew Starmer would bring up the former prime minister.
Starmer always likes to mention Truss, as Badenoch pointed out, but today he was nailed on to do so as part of the groundwork for Rachel Reeves’ spending review speech. The Tory leader, though, wanted to prepare the ground for her party’s narrative about what Reeves was having to do. She opened by pointing out that:
Since Labour took office, inflation has nearly doubled, growth has halved and unemployment has surged. Is this what the Prime Minister meant when he tweeted the economy is improving?
It is not unusual for Starmer to talk about one of Badenoch’s predecessors
Starmer had his own statistics, saying more people were in work, and that there were ‘tens of thousands of jobs’ coming in various industries as a result of investment in defence, nuclear and other sectors. Badenoch moved onto the winter fuel payment U-turn, saying Starmer had argued that its removal was necessary in order to balance the books. ‘But the books are not balanced, in fact, they are worse,’ she added, asking him ‘in what way are the books now balanced?’
Starmer complained that Badenoch had clearly missed cuts to interest rates, growth figures, the strategic defence review, investment in local transport, social housing and so on. It wasn’t a very convincing list, given the Prime Minister was largely referring to announcements about things the government wanted to do, rather than concrete achievements. But that’s not unusual in politics.
Neither is it unusual for Starmer to talk about one of Badenoch’s predecessors. He did so in his next breath:
She stands there to lecture us and I say, Liz Truss is obviously back in vogue: advising Reform officially now, haunting the Tories.
He then goaded Badenoch with quotes from her and some of her colleagues about the mini-Budget, adding, ‘They’ve learned absolutely nothing’.
The Tory leader carried on talking about the winter fuel payment, running the Chamber through the chronology of ministers claiming that removing the benefit was necessary to avoid a run on the pound, only to then change their tune and say they could reinstate it. ‘Why can’t the Prime Minister admit that he made a mistake?’ she asked.
Starmer brought up his other favourite Tory attack: the £22 billion black hole, before listing other things the government had done – most of which he’d mentioned at least twice in this session already. He teased Badenoch that she had remarked at the weekend that she would ‘be getting better in the role’, and demanded that she ‘start by apologising for the Liz Truss budget’.
Badenoch’s reply was quite funny, if unintentionally, for its confidence. ‘Mr Speaker, I get better every week! He gets worse!’ She added that he had no answers on how to make the economy grow, and claimed the strategic defence review was unravelling too. Then she demanded that Starmer admit that he would have to fund that review and the U-turn by putting everyone’s taxes up.
Starmer made a (poor) joke that Badenoch liked to rehearse her fury before PMQs. He repeated his weekly line about the Tory leader refusing to say if she would reverse the national insurance increase, and Badenoch replied that ‘every week I come here to tell him the truth’. But it’s not the Tories telling the truth that has driven many of the decisions in today’s Spending Review. It’s fear of Reform.
Comments