PMQs: Starmer jumping on pro-business bandwagon, says PM

Boris Johnson accused Sir Keir Starmer of “bandwagoneering” at today’s PMQs, after the Labour leader put pressure on the PM to do more to support British businesses. The heated exchange comes amid reports that Starmer is being urged to reboot his faltering leadership with an “unashamedly pro-business” agenda.

After praising everyone involved in the “truly amazing” achievement of the vaccine rollout, Starmer pressed the PM for assurances that the government would extend business rate relief, the furlough scheme and the evictions ban. He told the PM that he didn’t need to “leave everything to the eleventh minute”, adding that if he were Prime Minister, he would support business and protect jobs “now”.

Starmer had little luck drawing an answer from the PM, however, who told him to wait for the Budget and the roadmap out of lockdown, which he assured would be set out “in just a few days”. On evictions, Johnson said the government would “put our arms around the British people” and “support them throughout the pandemic”.

The PM added to this rebuttal with an attempt to quash Starmer’s pro-business credentials, claiming the Labour leader had stood on a manifesto “to destroy capitalism and dismantle the very pharmaceutical industry” that developed the vaccines, and that he had experienced a “Damascene conversion to the importance of business.”

Starmer hit back, saying: “I’m not going to take lectures from a man who wrote two versions of every column he ever wrote as a journalist, who proposed Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize and gave Dominic Cummings a pay rise.”

Next on Starmer’s agenda was Johnson’s “tough” border measures. He said: “Every week the Prime Minister says we have one of toughest regimes in the world. We know his Home Secretary disagrees with him”.

He also pointed to Oxford University’s research showing that “there are at least 33 countries around the world, which currently have tougher restrictions than the United Kingdom”.

Johnson retorted by saying that some countries in Europe “do not even have” the hotel quarantine scheme, and that “unless he actually wants to cut this country off from the rest of the world… this policy is measured, it is proportionate, it is getting tougher from Monday”.

Starmer insisted that the PM was “failing to give security to British businesses” and “failing to secure our borders”, before adding his own “constructive proposals” – firstly, to extend furlough, business rates relief and VAT cuts for hospitality, and secondly, to “secure our borders” with a comprehensive hotel quarantine on arrival.

Johnson rounded off the exchange by accusing Starmer of “bandwagoneering” in his switch to support business, and made an expected dig at Labour for comments by Lord Falconer, the Shadow Attorney General, who previously described the Covid-19 pandemic as a “gift that keeps on giving” for lawyers.

“Some people have said that this crisis is a gift that keeps on giving… and those people sit on the Labour front bench. I think it is disgraceful that they should say those things,” he said.

The PM finished on a triumphant note: “This is one of the biggest challenges this country has faced since the Second World War, and thanks to one of the fastest vaccine rollouts anywhere in the world, I believe it is a challenge this country can meet and is meeting.”