Towards the end of the Chancellor’s budget, Keir Starmer’s internal pressure gauges were running hot. He was pumping himself up for what might be the biggest speech of his leadership – his address in reply to an election-year Budget. Jeremy Hunt had caused several bursts of uproar, the House had been fluffed to a point just shy of climax. The atmosphere was dense, Keir was to be the thunderclap – and then the SNP spoiled everything.
The Chair read out a formal Motion designed to authorise any announced taxes that were to have immediate effect (there never are any). All those in favour? (Roar) All those against? (As loud a roar where there is always silence).
Eleanor Laing patiently explained to the claymore-waving clans below the gangway that this was a formality, it was a provisional motion, it was a preliminary motion, it was never voted on. The real Motion would be voted on next Tuesday and that a division now would be pointless before the Leader of the Opposition’s reply to the Chancellor – and so, she re-ran the question.
All those against? The SNP roared again: Nooooo! (with base notes of See You Next Tuesday).
Division!
These things take 20 minutes. The narrative of the debate collapses. The mood of the House evaporates. The drama is derailed. The SNP had read the rule book, identified Standing Order 51 and were quite entitled – and highly motivated – to ruin the Labour leader’s big moment. It was his fault the House hadn’t been allowed to vote on their Gaza amendment, so the House would be forced to vote on the Provisional Collection of Taxes Act (1968) and wreck his moment in the spotlight.
No wonder Scotland has such dental problems, this sort of revenge is very sweet.
In the previous PMQs, Stephen Flynn confessed – and I’m not sure he quite realised it – that Scotland was now a victim of Tam Dalyell’s West Lothian Question (that following devolution, Scottish MPs in Parliament could vote on English education but the English couldn’t vote on Scottish).
In a pleasing inversion of that, the leader of the SNP lamented that Westminster was taxing Scottish energy resources in order to pay for English tax cuts.
He is right. It is one of the advantages of being a colonial overlord, and a small recompense for shouldering the burden of that resentful outpost of humanity – once the home of Mill, Smith and Enlightenment.
Rishi had just been laying out the realities of and some of the reasons for our own sad national decline (it’s a steepening of our previous sad national decline, with added decline).
He lamented, for instance, the presence of violent rapists and other sex criminals working their way up the police forces. Rishi was able to announce a rather brilliant detective innovation – the police were now undertaking to check what criminal records serving policemen currently had. Apparently when people commit sex crimes, it gets written down somewhere, and now the police have discovered where those records are kept and are in the process of looking at them. Rape is actually contrary to the police service’s Code of Conduct, that’s how they know they shouldn’t be doing it.
This didn’t satisfy Keir Starmer. “I’m familiar with Codes,” he said and got the first good laugh of the session. He was not pleased. “This is too serious a matter for that,” he said. “There is a world of difference between a code and binding standards.” That got an even better laugh.
Keir was the Director of Public Prosecutions, the PM pointed out, when rape went virtually unpunished. Now a full 2.4% of rape trials today happen within a year of the crime being committed. It doesn’t sound a very high number, looked at in cool reflection.
Why that is so is a great mystery but some light on it was shed from another question. A Tory asserted that organising alliances to counter the threat of apocalyptic nuclear war with Russia was very difficult and slow and constantly stalling. Rishi told the Commons they were looking at “how we can unblock the bureaucracy” that is preventing meaningful action.
We will be looking at that from the ashes of our smouldering offices, as we crackle with radioactivity. Never mind democracy, or whatever is said in the the Chamber, we are actually governed by that blocked bureaucracy.
So, when Jeremy Hunt announced a plan to revolutionise the NHS, to drive productivity dizzyingly up to 1.9% a year (the head of the NHS has promised to do that, in return for a multi-billion pound funding rush), some of us remembered Rishi’s words and wondered what erematic extravagance would be deployed to unblock the calcified monster.
It’s all to do with apps and AI, it seems. The NHS is going to be “the most digitally integrated health service in the world.” Keir pointed out in his turn that Jeremy Hunt as Minister of Health had promised “a paperless NHS by 2018.” That made his party very happy. But on a serious note – remembering the computerised “Spine” that was going to digitise all patient records in the early 2000s (it was a forerunner of HS2 in that it cost £12 billion and was never built), an exciting opportunity is being offered to the public. Find the companies with the contracts to deliver this NHS revolution and buy, buy, buy their shares. And don’t get cancer because a share spike is the only positive way to make a killing out of the NHS.
As Budgets go, Chancellor Hunt put on a pretty good show for such a nice young man. He had an attractive rabbit in the form of a cut in the “tax on jobs”. Who knows he might suggest abolishing it altogether in their manifesto. There was also the new Treasury financing model based on the idea of claiming future spending reductions by preventive spending now. That could have got a good laugh, and may yet do. He also caused a very decent uproar half a dozen times,
“Lower taxes means higher growth.” went down so well with Labour that he used the line again in different forms. That Conservatives understand how lower taxes release economic energy which is why they were lowering taxes (uproar). That Conservative “governments bring taxes down” (uproar). That Rachel Reeves’ “thespian skills had her “acting like a Tory but we all know how that ends – with higher taxes!” Enormous uproar.
The biggest uproar he caused was by pulling Angela Rayner’s leg about her difficulties in the rental property market (Guido passim). Whatever he said, it caused Ms Rayner to flare up magnificently, cheeks shining, eyes blazing, fingers pointing, long red hair flowing down her front like something out of a Bob Dylan song. I hope I am old enough and sufficiently past it all to say she is a magnificent example of femininity, with all the best qualities of Queen Boadicea and the Lady of Shalott. I’m not sure Keir Starmer nor Rachel Reeves entirely agree, they quite ostentatiously ignored her.
Chancellor Hunt left us with his thought that Britain was to become the world capital of creativity, the next global SiliconE Valley, the international leader in financial innovation, the highest growth in the something or other and a place where all working people could rely on the full expensing of leased assets.
Oh, if only the Conservatives hadn’t put up taxes to the highest since World War Two! Oh, if only immigration wasn’t running at a million a year! Oh, if only they hadn’t spent £380 billion on lockdown! Oh, if only they hadn’t created the cat’s cradle of regulations and codes and directives that mean that nothing can be done – then what an election year budget speech it might have been.
Keir Starmer asked, “Honestly, what is the point of them?” And it was hard to find an immediate answer.
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