We’ve got to turbocharge our sketch and unlock its growth potential. Kickstarting economic growth is now the number one mission of the sketch.
Previous sketchwriters have lacked the courage to unblock the obstacles to growth. We will be making it easier to build on the grey-belt land in which the sketch is so rich, in order to drive investment and construct seven new runways.
Rachel Reeves’s rhetoric, and new-found optimism, are infectious. One feels one must do what one can to support her. At the start of Prime Minister’s Questions Sir Keir Starmer declared that kick-starting economic growth is the number one mission of this Government.
Let us leave on one side the point that kick-starting is what one does to an old-fashioned motorbike.
It does not seem to have occurred to Starmer and Reeves that by clarifying their goal as growth, they have rendered themselves vulnerable to the charge that much of what they are doing will inhibit growth.
Kemi Badenoch put it to him that the Employment Bill “fails his growth test”, and invited him to drop it.
Starmer responded with a string of statistics which sounded as convincing as tractor production figures in the Soviet Union.
“He needs to stop being a lawyer and start being a leader,” she told him.
The PM gets riled by attacks on his profession, and retorted: “We know she’s not a lawyer. She’s clearly not a leader. If she keeps on like this she is going to be the next lettuce.”
How often the PM reaches out to Liz Truss for comfort. He claimed also that various hospital improvement schemes “only existed in the head of Boris Johnson”.
Badenoch observed that the great beneficiaries of the Employment Bill are the trade unions. This produced a cheer from the Labour benches.
How gloomy the workers and peasants in the Labour Party look for most of PMQs (see the dubious expressions on the faces of some of Starmer’s colleagues in the picture above as they listen with what looks like trepidation to him).
They are not give much to cheer about by their own leader, but one hopes Badenoch will enable them to cheer at frequent intervals, for by doing so she will help them to show what they really believe in.
Sir Ed Davey, for the Liberal Democrats, urged Starmer, in the interests of growth, to set aside his objections to rejoining the EU Customs Union.
This Starmer declined to do. Perhaps it was beginning to dawn on him that going for growth is not quite so simple as it seemed when he and Reeves decided it was the way to relaunch the Government.
