Tell you something odd about Prime Minister’s Questions: the only ones who speak, for good or ill, with any vehemence or passion are the Scottish Nationalists.
Oh, there’s the opposition leader, Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer. But his nature is gentle, and he wants to appear more moderate than his communist predecessor. Lib Dem leader Ed Davey got a worthy question in about “genocide” by the Chinese government against the Uighur people.
But no one can blame Boris Johnson for that. Not even Ian Blackford, the SNP’s Westminster leader. However, apart from Mr B. and the one other Nat allowed a question, all the other MPs, Labour and Tory, merely put in gentle pleas for backing for projects in their constituencies. There’s no bite. No fire.
Doubtless, it’s down to the lack of atmosphere in the place during lockdown. As with the football, it’ll be better when all the foul-mouthed hooligans are back. In the meantime, the Vax Britannica exercised our classically educated PM yesterday as, once more, he accused Sir Keir of having had a slow, slow, quick, quick, slow approach to giving folk their jags. “He vacillates, Mr Speaker, we vaccinate.” Very good.
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However, that was only evening up the score, as Sir Keir had netted early doors after asking the PM to decry “irresponsible” comments alleging misinformation about virus risks, manipulation of statistics, dodgy assumptions and false modelling.
Boris came back with this bombshell riposte: “Uh … uh.” More concretely, he added that the country (England) was on a “cautious but irreversible journey to freedom”. It’s just that they’ve been taking the scenic route.
Sir Keir: “I think the Prime Minister dodged that question, no doubt because all those comments came from his own MPs.” Back of the net!
However, when Sir Keir called out a Tory council in the PM’s constituency for putting up rates, Mr Johnson retorted that the top 10 councils with the highest rates (presumably in England, as per) were all Labour. Then he took the opportunity to recall his own achievements as mayor of London, including cutting council tax.
Sir Keir: “This was the former mayor who thought water cannon could be used …” I wanted the Speaker to interrupt with a cry of “Ordnance! Ordnance!” But no such luck.
After these parochial matters, it was up to the SNP’s Mr Blackford to return to UK-wide issues, with a passionate condemnation of forthcoming “austerity cuts”.
Mr Johnson responded about “huge” sums being spent, including £13 billion to Scotland, which he wished the SNP’s Holyrood administration would spend better, particularly given its “failures” on education and crime. In the UK, and even in Scotland apparently, folk wanted to hear “less talk about a referendum … and more talk about the real issues facing our country”.
Mr Blackford ignored this tiresome Scotland business and came up with a big figure of his own, 120,000, being the number of people, he said, who’d died in the UK from coronavirus, which he blamed unkindly on Mr Johnson’s guidance. Even more hurtfully, he called on Mr Johnson to do a Biden, which was not a metaphor, but a reference to the 1.9 trillion dollars the US president was pumping into the American economy.
Trumped, so to say, at the numbers game, Mr Johnson returned to his favourite subject: Scotland. “All they [the SNP] want to do is break up Britain with another referendum.”
Independence: he’s always on about it. Boris, I mean. Mr Blackford hardly mentions it these days and, to be fair, it does get kinda repetitive. But, beyond the Nats, it seems to be the only subject that gets anyone animated at Westminster.
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