David Cameron, a man not known for his attention to detail, armed himself with several powerful statistics at today’s PMQs. Private sector employment, he boasted, had risen by a million since the election, while the deficit had fallen by a quarter. In response, Ed Miliband pointed out that borrowing is already 25 per cent (£9.3bn) higher than at this point last year, with George Osborne set to abandon his golden debt rule.
Cameron, naturally, replied that, if Miliband was so worried about borrowing, why did he want to increase it? Miliband should have replied that while Labour would borrow for growth, the Tories are borrowing due to recession. But, perhaps fearing that PMQs wouldn’t allow for an explanation of Keynes’s paradox of thrift, he simply declared that borrowing was “rising on his [Cameron’s] watch”. It was at this point that Cameron turned his attention to “predistribution”, the zeitgeisty concept Miliband discussed in his speech last week. It meant he said, borrowing a quip from Danny Alexander, that “you spend the money before you actually get it, and I think you’ll find that’s why we’re in the mess we’re in right now.” Seated next to Miliband, Ed Balls, who yesterday described “predistribution” as “a good idea looking for a good label”, looked visibly unnerved.
As a result, Miliband’s next question – “Is he going to be a beneficiary of the 50p tax cut?” – couldn’t help sounding rather desperate. Cameron failed to answer it, just as he failed to say whether the government would rip up its debt target, but his replies were sufficiently strong for this to be of little consequence.
The man who invented predistribution, Joseph Hacker, had, Cameron observed, written a book called The Road To Nowhere. But Miliband “didn’t need to read it, he’s there already.” Rather optimistically, the Labour leader again asked the PM whether he would benefit from the abolition of the 50p rate (“a question he will have to answer between now and April”). But, today at least, buoyed by the cheers of Tory MPs, Cameron could happily ignore him.
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