Keir Starmer didn’t have to defend his welfare cuts until later in the session at today’s Prime Minister’s Questions, because Kemi Badenoch decided to focus on the looming increase to employers’ national insurance contributions. She was right to do so ahead of the spring statement, and her attacks were, for the second week running, much better than they have been previously.
Starmer and his whips had clearly anticipated that tax and welfare would be the two hot topics of the session, and they’d found a Labour backbencher sufficiently loyal and self-loathing to ask a totally pointless question just before Badenoch. Andrew Pakes praised Starmer for the ‘welcome boost in the pay packages’ for his constituents and for ‘ignoring the voices on the opposite benches with our plans to make work pay, and can I urge to him to go further and faster in delivering our plan for change for working people?’
How could Starmer possibly disagree with such a question? It also gave him the chance to remind the chamber that Badenoch opposed the rise in the minimum wage and thinks paternity pay is ‘excessive’.
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