Everyone was very keen to attack Labour at today’s Prime Minister’s Questions, particularly over Keir Starmer’s decision not to scrap the two-child benefit limit. Before the session, SNP staffers handed out ‘controls on family sizes’ mugs to journalists in the Commons press gallery, a reminder of Labour’s disastrous 2015 ‘controls on immigration’ mug. Then SNP leader Stephen Flynn, and later Pete Wishart, both called the policy ‘heinous’. Flynn even said Scottish children were used to living in poverty, which prompted some ironic shouts from MPs on the other side of the house: the SNP has the power to change benefits policies anyway, but hasn’t scrapped the two-child limit on the grounds of affordability (the same argument Labour is making). Tory MPs also brought the Labour row up, and Sunak joked with Flynn that people didn’t need to worry too much, given Starmer never keeps his promises anyway.
Tory MPs in particular were noisier than usual today, presumably partly because they were just relieved they didn’t need to relive last week’s dreadful session from Oliver Dowden. Sunak didn’t put in a vintage performance, resorting to some pre-prepared joked and attacks that didn’t really work. Starmer described one answer as ‘nonsense’, and then ridiculed Sunak for getting his age wrong: he is 60, not 61, as the Prime Minister (who is very pleased that he is younger than Starmer) claimed.
The main theme of the Labour leader’s questions was the NHS, and he opened with the growing waiting lists for treatment. Sunak blamed the recent rise on industrial action in the health service and tried to turn the question back to Starmer:
We put very clear plans in place to bring down waiting lists in urgent and emergency care and primary care, and ambulances and outpatients and electives, those plans were working. But we do need to end the industrial action, so I’d ask the honourable gentleman if he does care about bringing the waiting list down, does he agree with me that consultants and junior doctors should accept the pay deal that the government offered?
Starmer accused him of ‘dozens of gimmicks’ and broken promises, and moved onto the ‘40 new hospitals’ programme. This allowed him to make an attack related to the Uxbridge by-election tomorrow, which was on the states of Hillingdon Hospital. Sunak couldn’t blame industrial action for this, so instead he talked about the Conservatives’ preferred attack line on the Ulez policy, claiming Starmer wanted to charge people £12.50 every time they want to visit their GP.
Starmer was on better form than Sunak, who didn’t really have a cogent narrative for what the Tories are doing on the NHS, despite it being such a staple PMQs topic. Never mind: he doesn’t have another session until the autumn at the earliest, unless he can find ways of avoiding those too.
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