Starmer ‘ruling nothing out’ on Trump tariffs but plays down trade war fears – UK politics live

Kemi Badenoch had a relatively good PMQs. But that was last week, when she had Keir Starmer on the back foot for a bit on mobile phones in schools, and no one was paying any attention because it was just before the spring statement. Today it was back to normal, with Badenoch underwhelming and Keir Starmer comfortably seeing off her various criticisms with punchy, but unsurprising, comments about the Tory record.

Badenoch’s best moment came when she asked about Birmingham council.

[Starmer] doesn’t want to talk about Birmingham and that’s because he knows the situation, so I’ll say it again: 17,000 tonnes of rubbish on Birmingham’s streets. Normally a state of emergency is called for natural disasters, not Labour ones.

But her main line of attack was on the economy generally, and particularly what the Conservatives are calling the “jobs tax” (the rise in employer national insurance contributions, which is just coming into force). There is plenty of economic evidence available to the effect that businesses say this will make them less likely to hire new staff, or more likely to cut hours, but instead Badenoch focused on the Tory claim that this will cost families £3,500 by the end of this parliament – a back-of-the-envelope calculation that has not been adopted by serious economists. Starmer brushed this aside quite easily, and mostly the economic exchanges sounded even more like a dialogue of the deaf than they usually do. Starmer and Badenoch threw slogans at each other, without engaging much with what the other had to say. Starmer’s slogans were more compelling, because they were mostly about how dire things were under the last government, which meant they were largely true.

This was the main problem for Badenoch, but another was that she did not get much back-up from her own MPs. Towards the end of the session Greg Smith asked a question that backed up the Badenoch “jobs tax” critique. (See 12.36pm.) On its own, a single question like this is unlikely to make much impression. But half a dozen of them might.

(To be fair to the Tories, they did not get half a dozen backbench questions. They just got three, and the other two were devoted to Scunthorpe steelworks and the child killer Colin Pitchfork. There is a lottery to decide who gets called at PMQs, and maybe the Conservatives were just unlucky in their allocation this week. But maybe some of them are not bothering to bid for a question. In total just four Tory MPs spoke at PMQs today – exactly the same as the number of Liberal Democrats who got a question.)

In the absence of forensic questioning, Starmer can see off Tory attacks by referring to the party’s record quite easily. In the chamber, that works well. But, in the country at large, these arguments may have a shorter shelf-life than Labour was hoping. More in Common published some interesting polling last week suggesting that only 27% of people think the last Conservative government is to blame for Britain’s low growth and that 51% of people think the government is focusing too much on blaming the Tories.