Even before Ed Miliband got to his feet at today’s PMQs, David Cameron had seized the advantage. Noting that Tristram Hunt and David Miliband were among those who would fall foul of Labour’s new policy of banning unqualified teachers, he quipped: “another example of brotherly love”.
Things didn’t improve much for Miliband after that. He challenged Cameron to say whether the government would use the banking bill to introduce new criminal penalties for bankers (anticipating an equivocal response) but was wrongfooted when Cameron simply replied: “we will be using that bill to take these important steps”. After that, the Labour leader’s subsequent (and pre-scripted) declaration that “if the government doesn’t put down the amendments, we will” fell entirely flat.
Miliband did have a smart statistic to hand, noting that bonuses had risen by 64 per cent in the last year, principally due to bankers deferring them in order to benefit from the 50p tax cut, but this only offered Cameron an opportunity to launch attack after attack on Labour for being at the wheel when Northern Rock issued 125% mortgages, when Fred Goodwin received his knighthood and when the boom turned to bust.
Bonuses, he pointed out, were 85 per cent lower now than in 2007-08, demanding that Labour finally apologise for its mismanagement. Miliband and Ed Balls have, of course, repeatedly admitted that Labour was wrong to regulate the banks so laxly but one can hardly blame Cameron for seeking to make them do so again.
Miliband declared at one point that he wasn’t going to “take lectures from the guy who was the adviser on Black Wednesday” but his history lesson will resonate less with the public than Cameron’s. That the Tories were calling for less, not more regulation at the time is, politically speaking, irrelevant. It is governments, not oppositions, that get the blame.
Today’s session was also notable for Cameron’s refusal to deny that the government is considering increasing interest rates on student loans taken out in the last 15 years. After Vince Cable and Danny Alexander rejected the story as “false”, this offers Labour a chance to go back on the attack.
Asked whether he had ever had any discussions with Lynton Crosby “about plain packaging of cigarettes or the minimum pricing of alcohol”, Cameron replied: “I can tell you that Lynton Crosby has never lobbied me on anything”, an answer likely to come under considerable scrutiny. But his pay-off was sharp; the only thing the pair discussed, he said, was “how we destroy the credibility of the Labour Party” but Crosby was not doing “as good a job as the party opposite”.
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