Consequences: PMQs 12th March 2025

Try asking Grok ‘When did questions at UK PMQs cease to be spontaneous?’ For it has come to resemble an am-dram living-room script-reading session. Ministers no longer have to fear the short, awkward questions of a Tam Dalyell.

The consequence of the present arrangement is that it gives the upper hand to the PM. He can answer with phrases chosen almost at random from his staff’s jargon generator, or simply drop a hot potato as he did last week with Richard Holden’s Bill banning first cousin marriage.

The steaming tuber this week was on a related matter, the 2021 murder of Sir David Amess MP by Ali Harbi Ali, the son of Somali immigrants. It was briefly served up by Kemi Badenoch who hoped the Prime Minister would agree that ‘getting the response to his murder right is vital not just to his family but to our democracy’; naturally Starmer did. Disappointingly, Kemi had nothing to add to the Home Secretary’s written response two days ago to Amess’ family that it was ‘"hard to see how an inquiry would be able to go beyond" killer Ali Harbi Ali's trial and recently published Prevent learning review.’

Actually not hard, one would think, bearing in mind that another case three years later, that of the Southport mass-killer Axel Rudakubana, was also one in which multiple referrals had previously been made to Prevent (review here) without success. Old lessons still not learned?

Once again, the Spud-U-Don’t-Like was relegated to almost the end of the session, where Andrew Rosindell (Con) pleaded with Sir Keir to reverse the no-inquiry decision so that the ‘related failure of the Prevent programme’ could be considered. Predictably the PM ignored that last and - with a sorrowing tone - said he would answer the ‘heartbroken’ Amess family’s questions that afternoon.

The elephant in the room is unmissable but nobody in the Debating Chamber is rude enough to point it out. Yet if the Labour Party thinks that by tactical negligence it can hold onto and control supporters from a restive and numerically growing minority it is surely mistaken. Reform’s disarray, if it continues, may suit the established Parties but will merely allow unresolved issues to compound until they come to a head, a consequence something all of us would wish to Prevent.

Worse than the blind official eye is the cross-party collusion to undermine the impartiality of the law. Andrew Snowden (Con) asked whether the Government’s adoption of the Sentencing Council’s recommendation to take into account the ethnicity and religion of offenders proved that the PM ‘has been two-tier Keir all along?’ Another own goal: Starmer reminded him that the proposal had been drafted in 2024 and welcomed by the Conservatives.

Similarly when Labour’s Shaun Davies said that the Tories had just tried to revive the Rwanda deportation plan the PM gloated that they had been running ‘an open borders experiment’ and then wasted £700 million removing four ‘volunteers’ whereas Labour had already ‘removed 19,000 people who should not be here.’

The opening question came from the Lib Dem’s Mike Martin, who spoke of the Russian abduction of Ukrainian children and asked Starmer to confirm that ‘British peacekeeping troops will be deployed to Ukraine only if the peacekeeping deal includes both the return of Ukraine’s children and Putin’s prosecution,’ the arrest warrant for the latter having been issued by the ICC in 2023. It’s not clear from this whether Martin was trying to forestall the insertion of British peacekeepers into Ukraine but in any case the PM generalised his response into a wish for ‘a lasting, just settlement for peace.’ The history of that conflict is a can of worms carefully left unopened, though all can see the terrible consequences.

However Russia must remain our eternal enemy - Classicfm’s news today took pains to reveal that the captain of the cargo ship that rammed the jet-fuel tanker off the Yorkshire coast is Russian. We look forward to early public revelation of all criminals’ nationality and ethnicity in future.

Starmer’s replies to Badenoch were of the usual spin-the-wheel nature. Kemi spoke of soaring nursery fees; Sir Keir boasted of breakfast clubs and how dare she ‘denigrate’ them. Was trash uncollected in Birmingham as well as what Starmer spoke across the Dispatch Box? Why, he countered, wages were up (without saying whose, or how many were still in work to receive them.) Was his Budget killing farmers? Lo, it provided for £5 billion over two years (for ‘sustainable farming and nature recovery.’)

Yet had not the Sustainable Farming Incentive just been ‘scrapped, or withdrawn’? Left hanging, that might have been a Carman-like poser, but no, Kemi pootled straight on to remarks on the trashing of the economy, which allowed Sir Keir to wheel out the 11% inflation under the Tories and his old friend the ‘£22 billion black hole.’

We have to take a longer view on this dire performative political wrangling: our national ruin began in August 1914. Despite the occasional refreshing shower the pond has been steadily drying out since then and the fish are biting each other’s tails. We live with the consequences, economic, demographic and social, of war and war fever.