WESTMINSTER (Labour Buzz) - Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson squared off after a week which had been bumpy for both of them. Johnson is fresh from a speech in which he urged people to go to the pub despite the ‘virus circling like a shark’ while Keir Starmer has been criticised for remarks made about the Black Lives Matter Movement and his decision to sack Rebecca Long Bailey.
It all made for one of the tensest exchanges between the two so far. Here’s what happened.
Leicester lockdown
Starmer’s first target was Monday’s decision to extend lockdown restrictions in Leicester. This was, as he pointed out, not a new development. Problems were clear 11 days before the decision was finally made to implement a lockdown.
Why, Starmer asked, had it taken so long to act?
Johnson argued that they had acted early sending mobile testing units and engaging with authorities in Leicester as they had done in other areas. It was only when things did not improve, he claimed that they had decided to go a step further.
However, as so often in these exchanges, Starmer was back with cold hard facts which are like garlic to a Vampire for Johnson. As the Mayor of Leicester had pointed out the local authority’s ability to respond to this crisis was hamstrung by the lack of support given to them by the Government.
Crucially, they had only been given the limited Pillar 1 tests rather than the Pillar 2 tests which included tests in the wider community. As a result, they believed they only had 80 new cases while the true figure was over 900. This contributed to a ‘lost week’ in fighting the outbreak.
Johnson tried to claim this was not true and that both sets of data had been shared, but Starmer reiterated that this information had come directly from the Mayor himself. Johnson’s desperate response was to claim specific problems in Leicester which had stopped people understanding how to act.
In other words, when in doubt, try to blame the people, a tactic he was to deploy with Starmer’s next question.
Showing guts
Starmer took Johnson back to a question from last week when Hove MP Peter Kyle, raised the very reasonable concerns of seaside towns facing the prospect of a flood of new visitors. Johnson’s reply was almost insulting as he urged him to ‘show some guts’. Given what then happened in Bournemouth, he asked if the PM regretted being so ‘flippant’. ‘It is important,’ he said, “that seaside communities should be as welcoming as they can but people have to behave responsibly.”
Once again, Johnson pushes the blame onto other people: onto local authorities, onto the opposition for asking such awkward questions and onto the people. Anyone but me gov...
Track and trace
The focus then moved back to another theme from last week when Starmer recalled his statement that the much-vaunted track and trace app had only picked up a third of people with Covid 19. Remarkably, the situation had got even worse with only 5,000 of 22,000 cases being contacted.
Johnson ignored the question and tried to celebrate the thousands who had been contacted to which Starmer shot back that it isn’t enough to focus on people who had been contacted while ignoring those who hadn’t. “If three quarters are not being contact, it’s a problem and you can’t ignore it.
A puny New Deal
The final question was on Boris Johnson’s big speech to the nation where he did his best Roosevelt impersonation and announced a new deal. The hole in the argument isn’t too hard to find and Starmer located it with his usual precision.
While Roosevelt’s New Deal was an injection of capital on an unprecedented scale amounting to around 40% of pre depression GDP, Johnson’s scheme amounted to investment just £100 per person across the United Kingdom or 0.2% of GDP.
“Not much of his announcement was new and it certainly wasn’t much of a deal,” joked Starmer.
Meanwhile, while he spoke, a number of companies including Airbus, Easy Jet and Harvest announced thousands of job losses between them.
Next week’s financial statement could be the “last chance to save millions of jobs.” He urged the Government to commit to extend the furlough scheme.”
Johnson’s response was to fling back accusations at the opposition.
“The best thing they can do is to stop equivocating and decide that they emphatically support ending lockdown and kids being back in school rather than being bossed around by the Unions,” he said. “We’re the builders, they are the blockers, we’re the doers they are the ditherers.”
Any other business
The session was also notable for a question on the Government’s response to China’s controversial Security law. Stealing a little bit of thunder from Dominic Raab later on, the Prime Minister affirmed his commitment to open up a new route to UK citizenship for people in Hong Kong.
Who won?
Asking who won these debates these days is a bit like asking who’ll win between Liverpool and Accrington Stanley, such is the gulf between these two. Again, we followed a pattern where Starmer has clearly decided that maintaining an almost superhuman level of calm analysis is the best foil against Boris Johnson.
Johnson, meanwhile, appears hopelessly at sea against clear, concise questioning. His only response is to dial the bluster up to 11 and, when that fails, pluck numbers from thin air. Starmer has picked his strategy and is following it through ruthlessly and, in a week in which he became the public’s most popular choice for Prime Minister, it appears to be working.
(Written by Tom Cropped, edited by Michael O’Sullivan)