Beleaguered: PMQs 2nd April 2025

Before the session began the Speaker read out a statement of his recent visit to the Ukrainian Parliament. He and other European assembly Speakers were there for the third anniversary of the Russian massacre at Bucha. He took with him messages of support from the Commons and the major English parties. The PM also referenced Bucha in his opening remarks. Later the Lib Dem Leader commended Starmer for his ‘commendable leadership over Ukraine.’

The consensus is dangerously comfortable and exclusionary. Nobody mentioned the ECHR’s ruling last month that Ukraine had failed to prevent the massacre of ‘anti-Nazi activists’ at Odessa in 2014; or the 14,000 killed by Ukrainian forces in the Donbas before Putin’s invasion. It is not even clear who in Parliament understands the white-hot hatreds at work in Ukraine, where Stalin killed millions in the Thirties; or that Russia today is not the USSR, which was a Communist bloc set on world domination; or the risks we run in stoking conflict with a nuclear power that could easily finish us with an EMP as Peter Hitchens has pointed out.

Our foreign relations are in further difficulties. The Chagos Islands giveaway is still a hot issue and was the subject of another ‘urgent question’ from the Opposition straight after this session (the USA seems unconcerned, perhaps mistakenly - China takes a long strategic view.) Attempts to stave off the impact of President Trump’s tariffs have been complicated by our lamentable record on free speech - though less so than the EU’s, it turns out.

The PM is clearly aware of a creeping crisis. He is fond of evasion and stock responses but his phraseology gives the game away. Today he said ‘national interest’ five times and ‘calm and pragmatic’ three times (and ‘calm’ once more after that.)

Calm was needed: the Lib Dem Leader urged a ‘coalition of the willing’ (including the EU and Commonwealth) against the US tariffs and Sir Keir replied that he had to keep options open.

Nevertheless the NIC hike was going ahead, whatever the objections from the other side - and as before, Mrs Badenoch was caught on the PM’s fork of not wanting it yet being unwilling to say she would reverse it. Again, he noted that the Conservatives were complaining about council tax increases that Labour had promised to freeze, but they themselves had allowed increases in twelve of their post-2010 years in power.

Sir Keir came under fire from another direction. Ayoub Khan (Independent, Birmingham Perry Barr) said that the piles of uncollected rubbish in Labour-run Brum were ‘so large that they can be seen by satellites orbiting in space.’ For him, it demonstrated that Labour were unable to govern. However Khan omitted to mention that a major factor in the Council’s financial problems leading to the bin strike stemmed from a court ruling upholding women’s entitlement to equal pay, backdated and costing £760 million.

It was the chance for a classic socialist point but the PM failed to exploit it. Instead he gave a familiar recitation on increased NHS appointments, the rise in the national minimum wage and ‘record investment into this country, growing the economy.’ The first is a service improvement but the second a potential threat to employment and the third, if Starmer’s dealings with Bill Gates and Larry Fink are a factor, potentially a matter of concern: what is left to sell off?

Ed Davey gave an example of what happens when we sell national assets to foreigners. In 2022 the American private equity firm KKR bought a 25% stake in Northumbrian Water, steeply increased consumers’ bills and last year dumped almost a million tonnes of raw sewage into a conservation area. Now it wanted to buy into Thames Water. Starmer said the Water (Special Measures) Act 2025 addressed some of the issues ‘but we will go further.’

Returning to Ayoub Khan, it seems he himself is not aiming for socialist equality but special treatment. For example, he and many of his co-religionists seek to influence our foreign policy respecting Gaza - a convert to Islam very nearly unseated Jess Phillips MP on that issue in last summer’s General Election. (Labour’s Jayne Kirkham also called for the restoration of aid and supplies to the Strip, as well as an investigation into the killing of aid workers there last year.) Another Birmingham MP, Tahir Ali (Labour), has been campaigning for a new airport in Pakistan. Since 1689 our Constitution has been based on national sovereignty, but internationalism is raising its head once again.

The Labour Party has its hands full trying to hold onto this vigorously universalist element in its ranks, which is a growing one: a 2017 study by Pew Research estimates that by 2050 Muslims may comprise up to 17% of the UK population. The Tories may be half-dead, yet how long will it be before Labour too are ‘Yesterday’s Men?’

There is still a little life left in the Conservative dog: only yesterday and at the last moment, but thanks to the efforts of Robert Jenryck MP, the Sentencing Council suspended its advice to judges to offer ‘two-tier’ justice to miscreants. Maybe one day the ‘protected characteristics’ general challenge to impartial law will be overturned.

Another sign that Labour’s juggernaut may swerve slightly came in last week’s PMQs when Kim ‘Reaper’ Leadbeater MP, already backtracking on the timetable for implementation of her ‘assisted dying’ bill, sought an assurance of continued support from Starmer. He carefully noted that there were ‘different views’ on the issue, identified her ‘as the Bill’s promoter’ and said he would work with her as he would ‘for every private Member’s Bill that passes Second Reading.’ One feels a gentle distancing in progress.

There were so many other items put on the PM’s to-do list. Claire Hanna (SDLP) wanted an assurance that the digital services tax would not be cut, so as not to pander to Trump’s ‘bullying’. Gavin Robinson (DUP) wished the PM to resist EU ‘retaliatory action’ on imports to Northern Ireland. Tim Farron (Lib Dem) asked for help to end the poverty of hill farmers and to maintain the landscape. Mrs Elsie Blundell (Labour) wanted skilled jobs for her Mancunian ‘grafters’. A North Devon hospital was still in need of long overdue repairs, said Ian Roome (Lib Dem.) Thousands of Scunthorpe steelworkers were facing redundancy, said Martin Vickers (Con). Greg Smith (Con) said increased costs created by the Government were causing layoffs at a local chocolate-maker (out came the ‘£22 billion black hole’ in reply.)

All this and more. Uneasy lies the head that wears the cloth cap.