LONDON (Labour Buzz) - For a man often accused of phoning it in, it was perhaps fitting that Johnson was taking PMQs at home via video link. However, while he managed to put a bit of social distancing between himself and his questions, he didn’t manage to close the gap between his answers and reality.
Indeed, he registered his first fib with the first question. Answering a softball question about an overpass at Gallows Corner near Romford, he crowbarred in a dig against Labour’s mayor Sadiq Khan claiming TFL was in financial trouble before the pandemic began despite the positive financial position inherited from Johnson’s time as mayor. In truth, the opposite is true. Sadiq Khan actually reduced TFL’s debts by over 70% that he inherited from Johnson.
It didn’t get much better when the turn came for the Leader of the Opposition.
Devolution disaster
Starmer’s first target was Johnson’s insulting description of devolution as being a disaster. This, Starmer said was one of the proudest achievements of the last Labour government.
Johnson responded by claiming that what he incorrectly called the Scottish ‘Nationalist’ Party had attempted to hijack devolution to campaign for the breakup of our country. However, Starmer replied: “The biggest threat to the union is the Prime Minister every time he opens his mouth.” When he said ‘take back control’ nobody thought he meant from the Scottish people.
Self-isolation
Appropriately enough, given that the Prime Minister was following advice and self-isolating, Starmer turned to the question of self-isolation. While MPs can afford to self-isolate, he said, ‘that’s not always the case for the people who send us here’. He asked if the PM would have been able to do the right thing if all he had to rely on was statutory sick pay of £13 per day or a one-off payment of £500 which amounts to just £35 per day.
The problem is made all the worse by the fact that only one and eight people qualify for the grant. He criticised the Prime Minister’s tendency to hype the support he was offering but ignore the many others who fell through the cracks.
“Only 11% of people self-isolate when asked to do so. It’s not because they don’t want to, it’s because they don’t feel they can afford to,” he said.
Johnson’s only response was to attack Starmer for not supporting the test and trace scheme, something which Starmer instantly slapped down.
“I’m not going to take lectures on supporting,” he said reminding the Prime Minister that the lockdown vote had been passed thanks to Labour. 32 of his MPs had defied a three-line whip and 50 have joined a WhatsApp group discussing how they can oppose him in future. “He should be thanking us for this support not criticising.”
There’s a huge gap in the system, he said. If you can’t afford to self-isolate there’s little point in being tested and traced.
Dodgy contracts
The remaining questions focused on the growing scandal over the granting of government contracts during the pandemic.
“While the Prime Minister and chancellor won’t pay people enough to self-isolate, we learned this week that they are willing to pay £21 million of taxpayers money to a go-between for lucrative contracts to the department of health,” Starmer said pointing out that a few weeks ago he was pretending he couldn’t find the same amount of money for free school meals. “Was 21 million to a middleman an acceptable use of money?” he asked.
Johnson chooses to ignore the question dragging out his old ‘Captain hindsight’ line. The government, he said, faced a difficult situation in which there were not adequate supplies of PPE. It was ‘typical’ of Starmer, he said to claim we went to fast when before he said we weren’t going fast enough.
“He talks about hindsight I say catch up, Starmer retorted.” “I called for a circuit breaker. He sat there and said he wasn’t going to do it, then he caught up. We’ve had a longer, tougher lockdown as a result.”
Starmer threw back to last week when Johnson couldn’t explain why it had paid £150 million for contracts which failed to deliver a single piece of PPE. Now he was defending spending £21 million on a middleman.
He quoted the National Audit Office which described the Government’s response as ‘diminished transparency. Half of all contracts amounting to £10.5bn had been handed out without a competitive tender and companies with Tory contracts were 10 times more likely to be awarded contracts.
Could the Prime Minister give a cast-iron commitment that government contracts would be submitted to more oversight?
Of course, Johnson couldn’t. Instead, all he had was faux outrage. This is a government which confronted a pandemic by dolling out dodgy contracts to friends and contracts. That such a corrupt government could
(Written by Tom Cropper, Edited by Klaudia Fior)