Live PMQs blog from noon

12.45pm: Video of the Brown-Cameron exchanges

Highlights, not verbatim:

12.30pm: Gordon Brown ends by warning that he will be examining the performance of Conservative councils over coming months - particularly how they help the elderly.

12.27pm: Brooks Newmark MP asks for the PM's view on the fact that domestic violence incidents has trebled to over 600,000 incidents each year.  [What a shocking statistic].

12.15pm: Nick Clegg asks about Afghanistan following his recent visit there.  It might take thirty years, he says, to rebuild the nation and does more need to be done to persuade the British people of the need for a long-term commitment?  He calls for the UK Defence Budget to be strategically reviewed.

12.12pm: Cameron responds by quoting Tony Blair who said that he didn't understand the tradition that PMs didn't attend by-elections.  Brown says that David Cameron never asks substantial questions.

12.11pm: Cameron: Why hasn't the PM had the courage to go to Crewe and Nantwich to explain his views on 10p?  Brown replies by saying that it's not usual for a PM to go to a by-election.

12.09pm: Cameron hits back by saying that this is just one tax con followed by another.  He notes today's IFS report that shows how many people are still losing from the 10p episode.

12.08pm: 'Will the £2.7bn compensation package be continued into a second year?' says Cameron in his third question.  Brown doesn't answer but challenges David Cameron to state his own position on tax.

12.05pm: To a silent House, Cameron wonders if there is a danger than the Burmese junta is just doing enough to stop the world from taking action that bypasses them but not enough to really help the Burmese people.  Brown agrees that progress has been too slow but he is hopeful that the ASEAN nations will now deliver aid with on-the-ground NGOs.  He repeats his view from last week that food drops would be counterproductive.

12.03pm: David Cameron's first question is on Burma. He asks what percentage and number of people are still waiting for aid.  Brown says the right response now is to get behind the ASEAN aid effort.

Noon: Just so you know: The Police Federation's grilling of Jacqui Smith might be more fun watching.  See News 24.  BBC story here.

Comments

[Rob]

I don't know if I can tear myself away from the webcast of the London Mayor's Question Time to watch PMQs!

[Daniel Furr]

Gordon looks extremely nervous on his feet today. Think we are in for a boring 30 mins.

[Tony Makara]

Brown talks about 'other people' is he afraid to say the word 'rich' these days?

[Cllr David Sammels]

Brown not answering any questions really is becoming very tired indeed.

[Daniel Furr]

Again, no one in the cabinet is showing support for Brown. Labour MPs are now silent.

Alan Johnson looks fed up.

[Tony Makara]

I hear a voice from Labour's ideological past!

[Tony Makara]

What exactly does 'more jobs' mean? No-one pins Brown down on this weekly brag of his, how many of these 'more jobs' are full-time, fully-waged and not supported by a state top-up in the shape of tax-credits?

[Marjorie Sims]

I am beginning to wonder if David Cameron is campaigning to become PM of Burma, He asks that many questions aboput a place I couldn't find on the map.

I'm rather more concerned about the money (or lack of it) in my purse right now.

Cameron needs to address the concerns of the BRITISH people first

[Tony Makara]

Why all these job-related questions? Is this orchestrated news management? Gordon Brown should stop counting the questionable numbers in work and count the 5.4 million people on benefits, thats a good two million more than the height of benefit dependency in the 1980s.

[Patsy Sergeant]

I see so Labour Councils NEVER do anything unhelpful as far as the elderly are concerned?!! Perlease!

[Man in a Shed]

Good tactical performance by Cameron.

First allow Brown to show just how boring he really is and he rants through the lists in his head that he thinks other people need to know.

Then hitting him on the Bye-Election bribe (but never actually saying that) and its short termism. What Brown hasn't twigged is that each time he tries to ask questions instead of giving answers the general public are shouting at their TV's - its prime minster questions ! Now how about a few answer ?

Brown has no idea why he is widely despised as prime minister in the wider country, but David Cameron does and plays him to devastating effect.

[Iain]

"Why all these job-related questions? "

Brown some what shot him self in the foot with his maths having said that the Conservatives left office with 3 million unemployed, and Labour had created 3 million jobs, by my maths that means the unemployment rate is '0' but even the Governments doctored unemployment figures don't say that.

[YMT]

Someone should remind Gordon this is PMQs not Leader of the opposition questions or maybe he's forgotten he is the PM? Sure felt like Cameron was being asked all the questions instead.

[Iain]

"Someone should remind Gordon this is PMQs not Leader of the opposition..."

Cameron, rather than reminding him that its PMQ's, should one day respond to a question from Brown by applauding the Speaker's foresight in giving Brown time practice asking questions for his forthcoming position as Leader of the Labour opposition. A response like that would humiliate Brown and embarrass the Speaker.

[Iain]

PS Politics aside I think we can all commiserate with Gordon Brown about his alcoholic aunt Alcy Aida.

[Tony Makara]

Iain, if I remember correctly regular unemployment was about one and a half million when Labour came to power which cuts in half Brown's figure of three million. Manufacturing was on the up in 97 and would have taken the unemployment figure down further if we hadn't had a change of government. When Brown quotes figures of three million he is using data from a quater of a century ago. I can't help thinking that with two loaded questions on employment coming from Labour backbenchers there has been a co-ordinated attempt to deflect from the fact that unemployment is up again and set to rise much higher.

Conservatives musn't feel handicapped about discussing Labour's unemployment because of what happened 25 years ago. As they say that was then and this is now. 'More people in work' is a myth because most of these jobs are part-time, or as we used to call in the 1970s, pin-money. It is dishonest of Gordon Brown to claim that four jobs being undertaken for ten hours a week is equal to four more people being off benefit and in work. Chris Grayling has to expose this 'more jobs' myth, because it is misleading the public.

[Londoner]

Have only read your summary, but I cannot help being amused by the lameness of the Brown response to one of the later Cameron questions when he says Cameron never asks questions of substance - and yet Cameron asked his first two questions on Burma. Brown must be gambling on the news sound bites not picking up the wider context - but he forgets how varied media outlets are these days.

Editor - have you given up assessing who has "won" these bouts?

[Simon Denis]

How typical of Brown to shed tears over the elderly when he all but ruined their private pensions. Worse, he has squandered the proceeds and left us with a filthy, underfunded hulk of a health service. He then has the gall to avoid questions with gratuitous insults. He is a boring, self-righteous zany who has no place in parliament, let alone number ten. No wonder he didn't turn up in Crewe - one glimpse of that morbid, joyless, slab of a face and another hundred Labour votes are lost and rightly lost. As for Blair, he must not be allowed to get away with pretending that he is not implicated in our current national debacle. Knowing him, he will use all his trickster's arts to pile the blame on his unsuccessful successor. But they are both guilty.

[Bexie]

given that he has effectively replaced the elected councils with an unelected quangocracy should he not be looking at his mates who he has appointed to them first?

[Iain]

"When Brown quotes figures of three million he is using data from a quater of a century ago"

And when Brown claims to have created 3 million jobs, 800,000 of them are state jobs he has created by inflating the State pay rolls, 1.5 million jobs have gone straight to foreign nationals ( mostly very low paid) and I believe the property sector has put on a 60% increase in people employed since 1997, some 300,000 people, whose jobs aren't too secure right now, which means that Labour have added some 400,000 jobs for British people over the last decade, not really something to write home about or boast about.

[Cleethorpes Rock]

Cameron should have asked:

"Where did the PM find £2.7 billion from for his election bribe? Was it:

a) From a cut in public spending?
b) Increased taxation somewhere else?
c) Efficiency savings
d) He borrowed it?"

In all, though, a decent job by Cameron. Still don't know why he went on Burma though, but I said that last week and received a hail of abuse.

[Bexie]

Pravda is declaring a Cameron win so it must have been a bruiser for brown.

[Tony Makara]

Iain, good points. We have to be very too when Brown talks about more people being in work and training, he likes to lump the two together. Of course by training Brown means the revolving door of the New Deal where the people disappear from the unemployment count only to return again. Very little is made of the fact that youth unemployment is up 20% under Labour, a truly shocking figure. One in five more of our young people unable to find work and falling through the benefits trapdoor. The fact that the Labour website claims we have full employment just goes to show what bare faced liars the government are, this at the same time that James Purnell talks about lifting 2.3 million off benefit. The government's capacity for inconsistency is incredible.

[David Sergeant]

Brown regularly avoids being destroyed at PMQs by quoting "statistics" relating to the 18 years of Tory government. Much is rubbish but some are half truths, e.g. Labour did NOT take over 3 million unemployed from the Tories, but, in 1979 the Tories took over 1.5 million unemployed rocketing upwards and unemployment reached over 3 million before the Tories turned it round.

One of the fundementals of NewLab's success is that they have been getting away with this sort of thing for 15 years because the Tories don't bother to put the record straight. By all accounts, since he has found he can get away with it, Brown is producing even wilder flights of statistical fantasy in his desperation.

[Tony Makara]

"Brown regularly avoids being destroyed at PMQs by quoting "statistics"

We have to wonder why the speaker doesn't intervene, after all its the same nonsense every week. When Brown starts to drone on about what happened 25 plus years ago the speaker should say that it is completely irrelevant to the business of PMQs. Anyhow the way the economy is going that 'more people in work' is going to sound as ridiculous as Brown's claims that we have low inflation and that more have been lifted out of poverty. Gordon Brown should be portrayed by Conservative ad men as one of those 1960s toy robots, who, when you pull a string, come out with the same sentence, over and over again.

[gezmond007]

A message for Mr Simon Dennis , being rude and childish makes you sound like some sort of boring, Zany self-righteous person yourself !

Calling people silly names does the party nothing but harm, it backs up the claim that the Tory party are the Nasty Party ! Grow Up !!

[James Maskell]

Brown is absolutely right. You must be very careful about Alcy Ada. I just cant trust her, but I love her all the same.

I know such jokes are childish and puerile, but its not been the same since John Prescott went away! Such moments of comedy gold must be cherished.

[DBX]

Cameron was quite right to hit Broon on Burma. What is happening there is a disgrace, and it also show's all of Labour's blather about ethical foreign policy to be a complete con.

A little concerned by Broon's remarks on Tory councils. Is there some kind of witch-hunt in the offing? It sounded almost Nixonian. I suppose he and Ed Balls are writing up the "enemies list" at this very moment . . . of course, you know what will happen when it turns out the Tory councils are hitting all Broon's badly chosen performance measurement metrics; NuLabor® will very quietly sweep this one under the carpet.

[DBX]

A word to David Sergeant; campaigning on Mrs. T's economic record is all very well if the country still has any kind of Elizabethan sentimentality about her, but actually believing it was good is delusional. Her economic management was, by any objective standard, poor; blatantly cynical manipulation of interest rates, passive-aggressive monetary policy, two severe recessions, and in between those recessions a reprise of the Barber Boom. The era of strong Tory economic management was under John Major, especially with Kenneth Clarke as chancellor, and it is that era which NuLabor® have been taking credit for. Major may have been dull, grey and cowardly in some respects, but do not take that away from his government. I can't think of a better economic record in a UK government since the Second World War; Major, Lamont and eventually Ken Clarke took a sow's ear over from Margaret Thatcher, they faced down both truculent unions and truculent monetarists, and they bequeathed the longest peacetime boom in history.