Quote-miner Cameron has no answer on tax credit cuts – AGAIN
You know Cameron has made a blunder when Corbyn aims this stare at him.
Conservatives should be in despair this week after David Cameron failed to answer concerns raised about cuts to tax credits – despite having a week to think about the issue.
All he could do was stutter about irrelevances and quote Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn out of context.
In Prime Minister’s Questions today, Mr Corbyn returned to the attack over the cuts – which will make three million families £1,300 a year worse off, on average.
“Last week I asked the prime minister the same question six times and he couldn’t answer,” said Mr Corbyn. “He’s now had a week to think about it. I want to ask him one more time. Can he guarantee that next April, nobody will be worse off from cuts to tax credits?”
Cameron’s response was a stutter. He tried to recover by reeling off his ‘comfort’ statistics: “£11,000 personal allowance… national living wage at £7.20… ” (We all know that the real Living Wage is currently £8.25 per hour – £9.40 per hour if you’re in London). Then he admitted: “We suffered the defeat in the House of Lords; we’ve taken the proposals away, we’re looking at them, we’ll come back with new proposals in the Autumn Statement.” And he ended with a jibe at Corbyn which is not worth publishing here but which got a response from the braying idiots behind him.
“This is not funny for people who are desperately worried about what’s going to happen next April,” countered Corbyn.
So Cameron tried to recover by changing the subject: “If we don’t reform welfare, how are we going to fund the police service… the defence service? If you listened to him, you’d still have families in London getting £100,000 a year in housing benefit,” he said, referring to Coalition Government changes to housing benefit rules that were supported by the Labour Party at the time, and therefore undermining his own point.
Corbyn was not to be deterred. He referred to a veteran of the first Gulf War, who is likely to lose £2,000 per year – more than the average – due to Cameron’s cut: “Is this how the government treats veterans of the Armed Services?”
All Cameron could do was serve up a poorly-reheated quote, off-subject and out of context: “That serving soldier is dealing with a Leader of the Opposition who said he couldn’t find any use for the armed forces, anywhere, at any time.”
This refers to a comment by Mr Corbyn during a Labour leadership hustings on Sky TV, in which he said the UK’s armed forces were overextending themselves by taking on foreign adventures as desired by Cameron. While he said he could not – on the spot – think of any reason to deploy the forces overseas, he qualified this by saying he knew there must be good reasons for doing so.
The result: Cameron out of his comfort zone, Corbyn victorious.
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Tweeted @melissacade68
He did give an answer. It was the same as last time, “the answer will be in the autumn statement”. It is, after all, a question for Osborne. It just makes Corbyn look silly as he just gets the same answer each time. He may be trying to make a point, but it fell pretty flat today.
If the answer is “I will tell you later” then it isn’t an answer now.
I don’t care how you think it makes Corbyn look. The fact is that he asked a question and Cameron could not – or would not – answer.
There is, in fact, a narrative building here – of a Conservative Government that refuses to release information that shows it to be bad, or incompetent.
The answer that it will be in the autumn statement is an indication that the policy is under review and the answer will be available later. There is no benefit to having the answer now. My guess is that people will certainly be worse off, but there may be some transitional relief.
Yes – the Conservatives are being made to review what was an unfair proposal. All Cameron was being asked is, has his party committed to making the new proposal fair? The fact that he won’t answer that speaks volumes.
Hayfords, it was Cameron who looked silly, and just because he said the answer will be in that autumn statement doesn’t fill many with confidence as we all know Cameron “stretches the truth”!
Proving yet again that Cameron is a bit dim: when a question is asked which he does not have a prepared answer he does not know what to say and resorts to criticising, mocking or bullying.
Corbyn’s tenacity is admirable – he knows damn well that tax credits cut have drawn blood – and he’s not letting the matter drop!
So many of us have been ‘stitched up’. By my book Jeremy Corbyn is doing his best to unpick the ‘stitching’ and hold the government to account!
indeed it does Mike.this govt gets very evasive on things it doesn’t want you to know about,like not telling the electorate BEFORE the election about tax credit cuts.
Who will rid us of this troublesome minister?