The battlelines for the next election were more clearly drawn today than they have ever been.
Labour’s key point is that, even if there is a recovery, only the rich will really benefit and most of Britain won’t feel it. This is why Ed Miliband asked again and again whether the Tories were going to cut the top rate of tax to 40p before the next election. Cameron wouldn’t reply. His only answer was that the richest were paying more and they had cut tax for ordinary people. Miliband quoted back at Cameron his 2009 pledge to keep the 50p rate but to no avail.
The Tory argument is that their long term economic plan is working and why risk going back to ‘same old Labour’. This translates to an attack on Labour’s record in office and a personal attack on Ed Balls who they see as Labour’s weak point. Cameron today repeatedly attacked Balls in answer to questions by Miliband on the 40p tax rate, quoting from Balls’ fairly unrepentant remarks to Andrew Marr at the weekend that in some areas Labour should have spent more.
The biggest effect of this was to see Balls and Miliband united on the frontbench with Harriet Harman smiling benignly on, especially when they mirrored each other’s gestures and both told Cameron to ‘calm down.’ Balls is one of Labour’s big beasts and is always more difficult to knock out than the Tories hope, and it will be harder once Labour really turns its fire on George Osborne who was louring next to Cameron looking to all intents and purposes like Caligula. The dagger is rarely sheathed with Osborne and, even when he is sitting quietly next to his boss, he looks like he might plunge it between his shoulderblades. He probably will if the Tories do badly in the general election next year.
For all his bluster, the election is obviously preying on David Cameron’s mind too. He told a couple of Labour MPs in semi-marginal seats – Barry Gardiner (Brent North) and Andy Sawford (Corby) – that he would definitely be visiting their constituencies in the next 16 months, and it was meant more as a threat rather than a reassurance. Gardiner had had the temerity to point out that one out of 10 of Cameron’s women MPs were standing down and ask ‘What is the Tory party’s problem with women?’
Perhaps election fever is why the House seemed particularly rowdy and loud. The speaker had to stop proceedings a couple of times to quell the braying benches.
Edinburgh Labour MPs got a particularly good crack of the whip today. Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) brought up her constituent Mohammed Asghar, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who has been sentenced to death for blasphemy, and sought assurance that all was being done to help him be released. Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith} taunted Cameron over the immigration bill and accusing Cameron of giving sops to his anti-European back benchers: ‘When will he finally learn they will never be satisfied by anything but British withdrawal from the European Union.’ While Ian Murray (Edinburgh South) asked about the economy – and whether Cameron would agree with Vince Cable that this was the ‘wrong sort of recovery.’ Cameron had been fiddling with his papers and Murray got a crack in about the answer being on page 37.
The atmosphere is likely to get more frenetic as the election approaches. Miliband was good and decisive. Cameron still reels off figures with a kind of Bullingdon arrogance which doesn’t connect and doesn’t seem to be about ordinary people. The more Miliband emphasises the whole country, the less credible it looks when Cameron and his second-rate MPs talk glibly about a Britain no one recognises – Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) was a case in point today. Ultimately the argument and election will be won on the economy: and the Tories will lose it unless they can persuade people that it won’t just be the super-rich who benefit from recovery.
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Sally Gimson is a journalist, a Labour councillor, and reviews PMQs on Progress. She tweets @SallyGimson