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METERPerhaps it was because most minds were focused on the results of the elections taking place in the United States. Or maybe it was that all the arguments had already been made when the prime minister gave his statement on the second national shutdown on Monday. Either way, the prime minister’s questions this week felt curiously unanswered. Rather as if Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson were following the motions, and both took it for granted that it would be another easy victory for the Labor leader.
Yet no politician has allowed repetition to stand in the way of what they are saying, regardless of whether they are right or wrong. So after inviting Johnson to agree that no candidate in the American election could declare which votes counted and which did not, like all good populists, Boris believes that you can have too much democracy, so as it was from wait, refused to answer. Starmer moved on to the issue of confinement.
Why had the government taken so long to make this particular U-turn? After all, it had been two weeks since the Prime Minister introduced a three-tier regional system. Boris screamed, howled, and tugged at his hair, aware that his more combed appearance on Monday had been seen as a sign of weakness, and proceeded to speak nonsense. He had been absolutely right to introduce regional locks and they had been working brilliantly until the moment when he suddenly realized they weren’t working after all and the infection rate was increasing across the country.
Maybe Starmer was just as confused as everyone else by that logic or just wasn’t in the mood to gloat. Winning an argument against Boris has become too easy. All he does is argue the opposite of what he says he will do and he will be shown right with an escalation of government in no time. So instead of making much of Johnson’s clear leadership failure and that the Conservatives were now embracing Labor policy, Starmer stuck to a few simple facts. If the government had implemented the two- to three-week “circuit breaker” lockout for half a period as Sage and he had recommended, there would have been fewer deaths and less damage to the economy. Simple. So what was the plan if the R-value wasn’t below 1 by December 2?
Here Boris fought a lot. While he could be sure that the blocking regulations that parliament would vote on that afternoon would end on December 2, he had no idea what would replace them had they been insufficient to reduce the infection rate. Even he seems to have given up on Typhoid Dido’s test-and-trace system being improved enough to bail him out, so all he could say was that he hoped the shutdown would work and it was political punctuation to suggest it wouldn’t work. . t.
Which was a bit rude, since it had been Starmer’s promise to vote for the government measures that would ensure that they became law. But Boris has never been noted for either his loyalty or his gratitude. He ended by incongruously saying that Keir should look more like Tony Blair, who had written an article in the Daily Mail on shutdowns, testing and tracing, and vaccines that could easily have been written by the current Labor leader. No wonder Starmer seemed surprised. He had spent most of the last week defending himself against the Labor left that he felt was already too much like Blair.
Seconds out, third round. Soon the two party leaders fought again over the debate on the new blocking measures. Unsurprisingly, both Johnson and Starmer seemed even less enthusiastic or combative than before. Boris spent most of his time trying to allay the concerns of libertarians in his own party who threatened to vote against him, rather than shoot Labor, while Starmer delivered his speech on autopilot. Everything had very little power.
Things got a little better when Theresa May was called when Johnson seemed to make a point of leaving the camera the moment she began to speak. There is little love lost between the two and May began by saying that she would not be able to vote with the government. She must have enjoyed that. Having been serially betrayed by Boris over the years, it was good to level things out, if only a little.
As is often the case, what was missing among the refuseniks of the confinement was an idea of why they might vote. How many Covid deaths a day were they willing to accept to protect the economy? What alternatives to circuit breakers did they suggest, given that infection rates in blocked regions almost invariably only seemed to increase? Still, not having the answers has always been the backbenchers’ main privilege.
Matt Hancock was left to close the debate for the government. He also lamented the need for the lockdown restrictions and vowed to rethink people’s right to play golf and tennis. He also hinted that the government might back down from community worship. Not bad, since prayer is all we seem to have left. With Labor backing, the motion passed easily with fewer than 40 Tory rebels. But few had any doubt that they would all be debating the same thing again in a month.
