Andy Burnham had a reasonable first outing at Prime Minister’s Questions today. He didn’t flounder, but he didn’t make it look easy, either. He did, though, manage to provide answers to Kemi Badenoch’s questions in a way that his predecessor had routinely failed to. Unlike Keir Starmer, Burnham actually engaged with what the leader of the opposition was asking. It’s early days, though: he also agreed to have meetings with a lot of MPs about their pet issues, and he may find that he quite quickly gives up both the habit of answering the question and of accepting invitations to discuss everything with everyone.
Badenoch opened by jokingly congratulating the new prime minister on his ‘stamina’, which raised a laugh. She noted that he had spent three hours in the Commons yesterday, but asked him if there was a single spending request that Labour MPs had made to which he’d said no. The Prime Minister replied: ‘What I can say to the right hon lady is I was quite clear in my statement about the need to get the welfare bill down. I do not want to be a prime minister that sees a situation where we have so many people in their twenties not in education, employment or training. I can’t defend that.’ He said this was ‘one area where we can engage in problem solving rather than point scoring’. It was a good first answer, which also made it harder for Badenoch to then accuse him of failing to cut the welfare bill – even though that’s precisely what she then did. She also pointed out that he had in fact not answered the question about which spending request he had said no to. She argued it was ‘delightful’ that he wanted to make everyone happy, but that a prime minister has to be a ‘leader, not a people pleaser’.
Labour could do with moving on from its Truss obsession
Her next attack, that Burnham wants to ‘bring the welfare bill down by spending more money’, was both accurate and unfair. Burnham is being naive to suggest that he will get early savings from a properly-funded programme of welfare reform. Welfare reform and cuts are not the same thing, and at the moment, the Prime Minister isn’t publicly accepting that. But if Badenoch wants to see the bill go down long-term, she should also accept that proper reform costs money up front. Anyway, she repeated her offer to work with Burnham on this matter – which both of them know neither of them mean. And then she asked him what he’d actually cut.
Burnham’s reply was a good one. ‘In terms of what has he cut: tax is the simple answer to that question!’ He then listed the tax cuts he had made for hospitality.
The two then ended up arguing about advisers and frontbenchers, with Badenoch quoting Jim O’Neill’s warning about public spending, and Burnham reverting to the tactic of his predecessor by talking about Liz Truss. This was, presumably in Burnham’s eyes at least, a pretty up-to-date move compared to his attack on Thatcherism yesterday, but it still feels as though Labour could do with moving on from its Truss obsession.
Badenoch also pushed the PM on defence spending – as did the Labour chair of the defence select committee Tan Dhesi later in the session. On both, Burnham insisted that the government would be using the spending review to set out a plan to bring defence spending up to 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035. But that spending review isn’t until next year, suggesting that the people pleaser is already trying to put off decisions that will irritate people for as long as possible.
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