PMQs: Miliband shows his strategic weakness

By Paul Goodman
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Ed Miliband could scarcely do otherwise than focus his questions on the bits of the Government's mid-term review that David Cameron didn't want to publish. And David Cameron could scarcely do other than answer that he had always intended to publish it anyway.  This ensured that today's Prime Minister's Questions was pantomime to such a degree that the Christmas season seemed still be stretching on.

None the less, I think the session cast just a little bit of light on the great debate about whether or not the result of the next election is already clear.  The three examples of allegedly broken promises that Milband cited related to the NHS, women, and "tax cuts for millionaires".  The first and third especially are Labour heartland concerns.  But the party's biggest strategic problem is voter lack of trust in it to manage the economy.  As usual, Miliband's questions had nothing to do with trying to solve this problem.

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Get that lamp from under that bushel! Tories need to wear their hearts on their sleeves.

By Tim Montgomerie
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Michael Howard wrote a good piece for yesterday's Times (£) in which he worried about the regulatory demands that the state is placing on the hospice movement. He was championing the same issue on this morning's Today programme. The ex-Tory leader was speaking as Chairman of Help the Hospices. I wonder if people who never much liked Mr Howard when he was Employment and Home Secretary or Leader of the Opposition might have been willing to give him the benefit of more of the doubt if they'd known about what has been his long-standing support for the hospice movement. More broadly I wonder if more people might be willing to give the whole Conservative Party more of the benefit of the doubt if they knew the extent to which Tory parliamentarians in general support good causes....

• Michael Gove on faster adoption...
• Robert Halfon against petrol prices...
• Damian Hinds against excessive payday lending rates...
• Andrea Leadsom arguing for childhood early intervention...
• Jeremy Lefroy leading parliamentary efforts against malaria in the developing world...
• Mark Pritchard campaigning for a ban on circus misuse of animals...
• David Burrowes for the release of Gary McKinnon...
• Nick de Bois against knife crime...
• Gavin Barwell and Charles Walker campaigning for greater understanding of mental illnesss..
• Steve Barclay for the victims of dangerous driving...
• Cheryl Gillan on autism...
• Nadhim Zahawi's campaigning and fundraising for vaccination programmes in Afghanistan...
• Tim Loughton on freedom for Tibet...
• Robert Buckland's leadership on human rights freedoms...
• Baroness Berridge and Angie Bray on religious freedom...
• Paul Maynard for language therapies...
• Claire Perry against online porn...
• Andrew Murrison, Liam Fox and our own Lord Ashcroft for military veterans...

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Christmas cheer and humbug at PMQs

By Peter Hoskin
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Today’s session of PMQs began rather gently, even constructively. The subject that held sway was the military. Not only did David Cameron take time to wish our troops a Merry Christmas; not only did he announce that there will be medals for veterans of the Arctic convoy missions; but Ed Miliband also used his first two questions to ask about the plans for withdrawing from Afghanistan. At this point, not a creature was stirring — not even Ed Balls.

But the mood soured rapidly with Mr Miliband’s third or fourth question. It was about food banks and the increasing numbers of people using them. Here, Mr Cameron paid tribute to the work done by these charitable outlets — which Harry Phibbs has just written about on the Local Government section of the site — but was jeered as soon as he mentioned the Big Society. “I never thought the Big Society was about feeding hungry children in Britain,” sneered the Labour leader.

This presaged what seemed to be a concerted attack from the Labour benches, suggesting that the Tories are taking Britain back to harsher times:

• Ed Miliband supported his attack on poverty and hunger by mentioning the recent sighting of Mr Cameron together with Rebekah Brooks. “Where was he this weekend?” he chirruped. “Back to his old ways: partying with Rebekah Brooks, no doubt looking forward to the Boxing Day hunt.”
• David Anderson asked a follow-up question about food banks which involved the phrase “back to the 1930s”.
• Robert Flello accused the Prime Minister of having a “Dickensian view of the country.” This, he added, means “workhouses for the many”.
• And Ian Lavery raised the tragic case of one of his constituents, who, he said, had committed suicide after his discovering that he was no longer entitled to disability benefits. “This is 2012,” he implored. “We’re meant to be a civilised country”. It was a moving question, and another reminder that the Tories should not be blasé about the effect of benefit cuts on people’s lives.

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Benefits cut an important dividing line through PMQs

By Peter Hoskin
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First of all, today’s PMQs was an extremely rowdy and red-faced affair — even more so than usual. Questions had to be shouted over the din. Ed Miliband called David Cameron “the boy from the Bullingdon Club”, to cheers from his own side. Mr Cameron suggested that the Labour leader had caught Ed Balls’s disease of “not being able to keep his mouth shut for five seconds”, to cheers from his. Mr Balls kept on waving a piece in the Prime Minister’s face. And so on.

But this doesn’t mean that the session was all heat, no light. To the contrary, what we saw was an argument that will, most likely, be one of the most significant of this Parliament and of the next election campaign. That argument was over benefits.

Mr Miliband set it up with his second question: how many of the people affected by last week’s cap on rising benefit spending are actually in work? His aim was to wheedle out of the Prime Minister an admission that the policy wouldn’t just hit the unemployed but also those “strivers,” as he called them, on in-work benefits. He strengthened that implied message with some forceful rhetoric (“It’s the cleaner who is cleaning the Chancellor’s office while the Chancellor’s curtains are still drawn”) and a chart from the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggesting that working families are now £534 a year worse off.

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PMQs: Cameron attacks Labour's NHS record in pre-Autumn Statement warm-up

By Matthew Barrett
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Today's PMQs was lively, but was simply the warm-up act for the Autumn Statement that followed it. I will attempt not to detain you for long.

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David Cameron uses PMQs to attack “something for nothing” Miliband

By Peter Hoskin
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Unsurprisingly, two subjects simmered to the fore in PMQs today: the Work Programme and tomorrow’s Leveson Report. The first of these occupied most of the exchange between David Cameron and Ed Miliband. The second emerged in backbench questions.

So, let’s start with the leaders’ exchange, shall we? This promised to be rocky ground for Mr Cameron, given just how underwhelming yesterday’s welfare-to-work statistics were — and that’s how it seemed at first. Ed Miliband began by quoting David Cameron, speaking last year, to the effect that the Work Programme is the "biggest, boldest effort to get people off benefits and into work that this country has ever seen." You could almost sense the embarrassment rising, like a heat haze, from the Coalition benches.

But Mr Cameron rescued the position in double-quick time. Helped by an error from Mr Miliband — who said that only two per cent of participants got a job, whereas actually that’s the figure for those who held a job for over six months — he clearly and methodically went through the numbers, listing some of the more encouraging aspects of the Work Programme. And then he added a sting. “The Work Programme is already helping thousands of people,” he said, quoting the CBI, before adding a line of his own: “These are people that Labour left on the scrapheap.”

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PMQs: Mostly subdued session gets going when Cameron attacks Miliband and Prescott's Humberside defeat

By Matthew Barrett
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PMQs returned this afternoon after the PPC and by-elections and a week of Nick Clegg filling in.

The first third or so of the session this week was taken up by Ed Miliband and David Cameron agreeing with each other on Israel/Palestine's current conflict. The only moment of possible disagreement was when Ed Miliband asked if the Prime Minister supported an enhanced status for Palestine at the United Nations. Mr Cameron said he did not, and further said any peace negotiations must be carried out between Israel and Palestine themselves, rather than at the UN level.

After a few backbench questions, Ed Miliband asked a further set of questions, which were a little livelier. Mr Miliband pointed out that the Government promised no rationing of NHS services - had the Prime Minister kept that promise? Mr Cameron noted the year-on-year increase in the NHS under this government. Ed Miliband then read a quote from the Royal College of Ophthalmologists, which said the number of cataract operations is down. Mr Cameron responded with a familiar set of facts: under this Government, the number of doctors is up, operations up, waiting lists down, and waiting times down.

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Nick Clegg stands in for David Cameron at PMQs, still hates Labour

By Peter Hoskin
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Drop Nick Clegg in front of the despatch box, and some remarkable transformations take place. The Labour benches start braying even more than usual. The Deputy Prime Minister gets angrier and angrier in return. And the Tory backbenches start to warm to this fellow who has it in for their shared enemy across the Commons. This is what happened in PMQs today, where Mr Clegg was standing in for the absent David Cameron.

We did have to wait longer than usual for the process to unwind itself, however — as Harriet Harman started with a couple of questions about the Leveson Inquiry that included words such as “cross-party” and “talks”. The Deputy Prime Minister was suitably non-partisan in response. He did stress that the press should remain “free, raucous and independent,” but he also added that “everyone accepts that it cannot remain business as usual”.

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Miliband buries himself during a ghoulish session of PMQs

By Peter Hoskin
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Europe, wind farms, Trident, boundaries — this Halloween edition of PMQs promised to be rather gruesome for David Cameron, and that’s how it seemed for the opening five minutes or so.

The first question, from Andrew Stephenson, was about the EU Budget. And although it was one of those friendly inquiries of the sort “Does the Prime Minister agree with the Prime Minister’s policy?”, it also suggested just how nervous the Tory leadership is about tonight’s vote. The PM’s answer was designed to ward off any knives pointed at his back.

But then Ed Miliband popped up in front, with a knife of his own. The Labour leader had unearthed a question that Mr Cameron asked of Gordon Brown, only four months before the last election. “At a time when budgets are being cut in the UK,” the quoted question began, “does the Prime Minister agree, when reviewing the EU Budget, the main purpose must be to push for a real-terms cut?” Eek. Surely Mr Cameron would end up on the ropes.

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Cameron hints at "good news" to come for the Government, but Miliband wins PMQs exchange

By Matthew Barrett
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PMQs was predicted to be a lively affair today - and it was, but not necessarily for the reason anticipated. The Prime Minister's most probing questions came from the Leader of the Opposition, and not from his own backbenchers - who could have caused Mr Cameron some trouble on the issue of giving prisoners the vote. 

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