This week the part-time chancellor has been whinging to a group of business leaders that they haven’t been publicly defending his decision to cut taxes for the richest one per cent.
This in a week we learned that FTSE 100 bosses have awarded themselves an extremely generous pay rise of 12 per cent on average. With one in four pocketing staggering pay rises of 40 per cent or more.
And how did the government respond?
Well, in the enterprise bill on Monday, the business secretary announced he is to water down proposals, which were already inadequate, to give shareholders binding votes on executive pay.
As I said in the chamber, instead of encouraging business leaders to lobby for an even better deal for the richest one per cent the chancellor should clamp down on unwarranted and exorbitant rewards for those at the very top.
Meanwhile, the chancellor disgracefully ducked his own statement on banking reform on Thursday. We know he’ll do anything to get out of visiting the House of Commons chamber but I hope he will make a rare appearance soon to explain what happened to his abandoned slogan:
‘We’re all in this together’.
This week we have also had a report on child poverty.
This independent report said that the last Labour government cut child poverty at a pace, and at a scale, unmatched in any other industrial country.
It revealed that measures Labour introduced in government stopped nearly a million children growing up in poverty.
The report also said measures introduced by this government were both ‘unfair’ and ‘short-sighted’.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies expects the number of children growing up in poverty to increase by 600,000 over the next two years. And the government’s response is to try and redefine poverty.
As I said at business questions on Thursday, this is a government that cuts taxes for the richest and makes the poor poorer while trying to cover it up.
Next week the G20 is meeting in Mexico. Britain is in a double-dip recession made in Downing Street. The G20 provides the perfect opportunity for the government finally to come up with a Plan B.
But I fear ministers will have trouble even making it to the G20 when they are constantly U-turning. A holding pattern over Heathrow seems like a more realistic ministerial destination.
The chancellor made good use of the recess to perform mass U-turns on his omnishambles of a budget.
I now understand why there are so many recesses at the moment. The government has built time into the parliamentary calendar to allow ministers to slip out all their U-turns when the House isn’t sitting.
But as I said on Thursday, the government should have the guts to come to this House to announce their U-turns.
Finally, statistics show that house building is down, homelessness up, rough sleeping up and young people find it impossible to get on the housing ladder.
And what has been the response of the housing minister? Well, he has spent his time time spinning figures that are palpable nonsense.
I asked the leader of the House at business questions, in what parallel universe can the housing minister describe a year-on-year drop of 68 per cent in the number of affordable housing starts as an ‘impressive’ and a ‘dramatic’ increase?
He claimed there was a ‘net loss’ of 45,000 homes between 1997 and 2010, before deciding that figure wasn’t sufficiently dramatic and press releasing that we ended up with 200,000 fewer homes.
In fact, the government’s own statistics show that by May 2010 compared with May 1997, there were an additional two million homes in England.
I have asked the leader of the House to arrange for the secretary of state for communities and local government to make a statement explaining the antics of the housing minister as well as his flawed understanding of simple mathematics.
It is all further evidence of a sorry record from an out-of-touch and incompetent government.
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Angela Eagle is MP for Wallasey, shadow leader of the Commons and writes the weekly Business of Parliament column for Progress