Good morning. Andy Burnham will face PMQs for the first time as PM today but he already has a fairly good idea of the questions he might get from Kemi Badenoch because she rehearsed them all yesterday. Here is an excerpt from the press release the Conservatives put out yesterday summarising those questions – and their take on how Burnham responded.
double quotation markKemi Badenoch asked if Burnham would:
-Set out a plan to get defence spending to 3% of GDP;
-Confirm whether Labour will use a Rwanda-style deal to secure our borders;
-Set out a timeline to get foreign-born prisoners out of British prisons;
-Pledge no new taxes at the forthcoming budget; and
-Stand up to his own backbenchers and cut benefits.
In response, Burnham floundered and couldn’t give straight answers to clear, straight questions.
Today Badenoch may well ask again about tax, benefit cuts and the economy.
And that is because, while Westminster was focused on Burnham’s impressive debut in the Commons yesterday afternoon, the more significant story may have been happening elsewhere, on the financial markets. The Telegraph sums it up like this.
Not for the first time, the Telegraph’s headline was not entirely fair to a Labour prime minister. As Heather Stewart explains in her Guardian story, the government’s long-term borrowing costs did jump “to their highest level since early 1998 on Tuesday as investors dumped government bonds” – but this was mainly the result of international factors.
As Graeme Wearden reports in his business live blog today, the UK is not the only country where government borrowing costs are soaring; Graeme says Australia, India and Germany are among other states facing similar problems.
But, just because the UK is not alone, that does not mean the problem is not real; as Heather reports in her story, the rise in borrowing costs means the Treasury has lost £12bn from its fiscal safety net. She quotes an economist saying “based on Tuesday’s yields, [the Treasury’s] headroom against the current budget rule would fall from £26bn at Rachel Reeves’s spring forecast to £13.8bn before covering any additional spending plans.”
When Badenoch challenged Burnham over tax yesterday, he pointed out that in his first week in office he made two tax-cutting announcements. But he refused to oblige her by ruling out tax rises in the budget.
Today the Resolution Foundation thinktank (whose former chief executive, Torsten Bell, is now a Treasury minister) has published a report saying that, if Burnham wants to raise defence spending, as he proposes, taxes will probably have to rise for ordinary workers. It says:
