PMQs hasn’t always been such a tedious affair. See Tony Blair vs John Major: “There is one very big difference – I lead my party, he follows his.” Or David Cameron to Blair: “You were the future once.” But now in the less-than-inspiring grips of Corbyn and May, PMQs has settled into a dull, unproductive, but somehow still mind-numbingly-pompous charade.
No better was this exemplified than today. With England and the capital going through a knife crime crisis, as 10 teenagers alone have been stabbed and killed so far in 2019, Corbyn and May tussled over the government’s policy, or lack of, to tackle the spate.
The main point of contention was May’s comment from earlier in the week, that the cuts to policing were not directly linked to the increase in knife crime in the UK’s cities. Of course there is a link between a decline in police numbers and a rise in violent crime, Corbyn rightly pointed out. But we can only understand the phenomenon if we understand the root causes, May also rightly pointed out.
The pair disagreed over Police Commissioner Cressida Dick’s diagnosis of the problem. Corbyn re-stated the link between declining police numbers and rising violent crime (quoting Dick), and May retaliated (also quoting Dick) by arguing that “we can’t arrest our way out of this problem.” They, again, are both right. Both of those things can be true at the same time. But either due to their mutual intellectual inflexibility, or due to sheer obstinance, neither were capable of acknowledging that. And neither set of benches were interested in approaching the crisis with a modicum of nuance required.
They talk past rather than to each other. Corbyn resorted to restating his original position, linking it to historic complaints about Tory austerity, while May resorted, again, to pointing out Labour’s track record on the economy. Hint: She thinks it’s bad. She makes that clear every week.
Meanwhile, no progress is made. The Tory policy is no clearer, and Labour’s grievances are lost amidst the endless to and fro of the stats slinging match.
The reality is that PMQs has become nothing beyond an exercise in creating social-media-friendly soundbites for the respective parties to pacify their own depressed support base. What was originally conceived as an opportunity for the chamber to directly hold the government to account for its policy is now a showboating display of the navel-gazing leadership of both parties, punctuated only occasionally by the genuinely well-meaning backbenchers trying to get air time for their constituencies.
Conservative MP Julia Lopez, whose constituent was killed in a stabbing last Friday, best described the spectacle when she said, after Corbyn and May’s tussle, that she didn’t want to see politicians throwing blame at one another over “stolen lives.”
And she’s right. While an epidemic of violence is sweeping the UK’s streets and young people are being routinely killed, the vision of May and Corbyn one-upping each other with unrelated statistics and patting themselves on the back when they manage to rouse school boy cheers from their own benches is pretty shameful indeed.
