The Conservatives should be landing some pretty painful hits on Labour at the moment, given the Budget has gone down as a piece of irrelevance, and the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood yesterday had to water down her immigration reforms. But instead, the Tory party is still struggling with its own recent legacy on both the economy and migration, which means Labour frontbenchers are having a much easier time.
Take Treasury Questions in the Commons today. When the session moved to topical questions, shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith asked Chancellor John Healey about the likelihood of the Bank of England putting up interest rates next week. He demanded: ‘Will he now admit that it is his failure to get a grip on borrowing that will be causing rates to rise?’ The Chancellor replied:
The party that recently lost an election is struggling to get a foothold in debates that it should find easy
The Budget confirms that borrowing will fall every year… the honourable gentleman is right that we inherited a debt mountain. We inherited that as a part of the consequence of the disastrous mini-Budget that he was part of in the Treasury team. It crashed the economy, it collapsed confidence in Britain’s fiscal strength, we are fixing his failures…
Griffith replied that the Conservatives had laid out plans to cut over £70 billion of public spending, adding: ‘He’s very welcome to copy them.’ There were ironic laughs in response to this from the Labour benches. The shadow chancellor then used that second question to ask whether Healey agreed with him that ‘not a penny of taxpayers’ money should be used on reparations’ for the slave trade. Healey explained that Prime Minister Andy Burnham had already said ‘reparations are not the right approach’ and then turned on Griffith:
He asks this question because he distracts from the Budget and the question that people are asking is why does he not back the Budget action we have taken to give Britain a bit of breathing space? Why does he not back the action we’re taking to fund that help this winter?
It was a pretty low-voltage exchange, especially compared to the way Kemi Badenoch savaged the Budget in her own response to the announcement last week. But it was still reminiscent of the exchanges that the Tories had with Labour after the 2010 election, when the then opposition frontbench simply could not make any kind of economic critique without being accused of being the party that had crashed the economy.
Back then, George Osborne and David Cameron were far more ferocious with Ed Balls and Ed Miliband than the exchanges between Healey and Griffith, and that’s partly a personality thing. But the underlying message is still the same: the party that recently lost an election is struggling to get a foothold in debates that it should find easy, for the simple reason that its own legacy remains bigger than any bad decisions that are being taken today.
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