Rishi Sunak used today’s Prime Minister’s Questions largely as an opportunity to attack the Labour party, and specifically Keir Starmer’s policy U-turns. This is fertile territory given there have been so many, even if the Labour leader is now adopting better positions than ones he naively took earlier on in his tenure. It does also show that the Prime Minister doesn’t feel he has a great deal to boast about when it comes to his own government achievements.
Starmer invited these attacks by making his first question about Tory frontbench confusion over housebuilding. He said: ‘His party spent thousands of pounds on adverts attacking plans to build 300,000 new homes a year. At the same time, his Housing Minister says it’s Tory party policy to build 300,000 new homes a year. So is he for building 300,000 new homes a year or against it?’ Sunak responded with a list of things the Conservatives had achieved on housing, from 2.2 million additional homes, housing starts at double the level inherited from Labour, and rising housing supply. He didn’t, though, answer the question – something Starmer immediately pointed out, adding a further demand for the PM to ‘point to a single person in housing and construction anywhere who thinks he’ll actually hit his target of 300,000 new homes a year’. Sunak did not, and then started to attack Labour’s policy stances. ‘First the Shadow Communities and Housing Secretary said communities should have control, but then he then said we should get the targets back and disempower local people. I do want to give him some advice. I don’t think it’s local people that are the problem, I think it’s Labour party policy.’
Starmer responded in kind with the claim that Sunak had ‘crumbled to his backbenchers and scrapped mandatory housing targets’ and that housebuilding had collapsed. Sunak shot back that Starmer ‘supports housebuilding, especially on the Green Belt’ but that ‘unfortunately for him, the shadow deputy prime minister, the shadow minister for women, the shadow health, justice, defence, business, Northern Ireland and Scotland ministers are all united against more housebuilding in their areas’. It was only when Sunak mentioned the last two briefs that it became clear he wasn’t just listing Angela Rayner’s many job titles and that these were in fact all different people. But by this point the session had become two men accusing one another of the same thing.
Starmer then claimed Sunak had ‘given up’, and moved onto mortgages. The Prime Minister meanwhile wanted to stick with housebuilding, and continued to talk about who on the Labour frontbench ‘doesn’t actually agree with his new policy on concreting over the green belt’. It was only in a later answer that Sunak addressed the mortgage issue, saying ‘the vast majority of the mortgage market is now covered by the new mortgage charter’. That allowed the Labour leader to get in his out of touch attack line that he uses every week on Sunak, today saying: ‘It’s sort of housing crisis, what crisis with this Prime Minister!’
What did we learn by the end of these exchanges? Nothing, really: both leaders have significant weaknesses on housebuilding and are also prepared to mischaracterise the other. Starmer does not have a policy of ‘concreting over the green belt’, and neither does Sunak have an inability to recognise that there is a crisis in the housing sector. Both had good attack lines: Sunak having given up has a real ring of truth, even if just about the wider Conservative party, while Starmer flip-flopping on policy is a regular occurrence.
What will cause the Prime Minister more trouble is the question from Labour frontbencher Alison McGovern, who asked what would happen if the Prime Minister failed to meet his promise to halve inflation. Would he call an election? The Prime Minister replied that he was sticking to his plan and taking responsible decisions – but that suggests that he too is building up to miss that target.
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