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[/audioplayer]When George Osborne lays a political elephant trap for Labour, he normally does so by cutting welfare and daring the Opposition to support him. Well, he’s done some of that today, cutting tax credits, housing benefit and the amount of money that employment support allowance claimants preparing to return to work can receive. But Labour has grown used to those traps now. What it isn’t used to navigating is responding to a measure that it would have introduced itself and which has a rather leftish feel.
The announcement of the National Living Wage, which Fraser and I examine here and here, right at the end of the Budget meant that Labour MPs were strangely frozen in position as Harriet Harman started speaking. Harman sounded rather as though she didn’t want to be there: indeed at one point during her speech, she paused as she was heckled by MPs opposite and I rather wondered whether she might be about to say ‘I can’t be bothered with this’. But she ploughed gamely on, while trying to work out how her party will play this once she was able to leave the Chamber.
There is a great deal of debate about whether this living wage is indeed a living wage, but the point is that every complaint from a Labour MP that includes the words ‘we need a living wage’ can quite easily be answered with ‘well, we’ve got one’, even if the detail doesn’t quite back that up.
Aside from her struggle to react to a policy she didn’t know would be in the Budget, Harman’s speech was mostly a holding statement in which she quibbled with the aspirations that the Chancellor had set out, while trying to portray Labour as a more reasonable party than the one producing ‘predictable howls of protest’ that Osborne had described as part of his Budget briefings. She said:
‘So while we will fiercely oppose policies that hit working people and we will expose policies that are unworkable, where the Government comes forward with ideas that are sensible, we will be prepared to look at them. We will be a different kind of Opposition.
She used this new stance to lecture Osborne on his ‘political traps, games and tactics’, which she said were ‘designed by the Chancellor to help him move in next door’. But she knows that the biggest trap in today’s announcement will make it that more difficult for Labour to make the case that it should be moving into Number 10 any time soon.
Now the real work begins for Labour of finding in the Budget documents the killer details that could turn this from an apparently very difficult Budget for the Opposition into a political mess that it can feast on. But it still needs to work out how to respond to the living wage rabbit, and the benefit cuts. The traps won’t go away, even if Labour does find problems in this Budget that are useful short-term distractions.
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