By Sam Macrory - 17th March 2011
Turn back the clock, put on some old-school vinyl, and join in for the chorus. Yesterday's PMQs had a decidedly retro feel, says Sam Macrory.
With much the same effect as when a wedding DJ reaches for a Queen record at a few minutes before midnight, if a Labour leader brings up the NHS at PMQs then his MPs cheers deliriously. And if his Tory counterpart mentions the trade unions, then his own backbenchers do the same. Crowd-pleasing doesn’t come much easier.
But rather like the dance-floor masses who bark out every word of the chorus and mumble the verses, the small print of NHS reform bill seems to be lost on some MPs.
Including, on yesterday's evidence, the prime minister, and he is the one who needs to know – especially with his health secretary Andrew Lansley otherwise engaged in a radio studio over the road.
When Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, asked whether the reformed NHS would be subject to EU competition law, Cameron, seemed stumped. “I am answering the question!” he shouted as Labour members frothed with excitement.
Except he wasn’t, he was reading out Labour’s manifesto. The reforms are complicated enough for our finest parliamentary minds to understand, let alone the man or woman reading the dog-eared glossy magazine in the doctor’s waiting room.
That said, the finer details of EU competition law hardly make for a populist argument, but the Labour leader was just building up to his sing-a-long moment.
Meanwhile Cameron was lurching in search of a decisive answer. Luckily his deputy Nick Clegg seemed to grasp what he was saying and nodded along enthusiastically. Clearly a thrashing of sorts had been handed out after last week’s public show of rebellion over electoral reform.
There was going to be an “anti-cherry picking amendment” said Cameron, and while Clegg liked the sound of such fruit-saving measures, the members of his party looked on gloomily. After all, most of them had used a vote at their spring conference to express their worries about the reforms, as Miliband was keen to remind the prime minister.
Cameron probably didn’t care. These days a Lib Dem policy-changing motion changes nothing after all. Instead he went all retro.
“All that has changed is that they are just jumping on every bandwagon, supporting every union, blocking every reform and opposing the extra money being put into the NHS,” the prime minister shouted in the direction of the Labour benches.
It worked rather better than his attempt to paint Miliband as a reform-phobe by calling the Labour leader "son of roadblock." That made him sound like a long-forgotten Hammer horror sequel, but the partisan politics - with a hint of tribalism thrown in - pleased Tory backbenchers far better than a run down of the logic for the health reforms.
The retro-feel continued: fresh-faced Tory backbencher Gavin Williamson’s soft question on NHS productivity prompted Labour shouts of “Tory Boy” – not seen on our TV screens since the 90s – while Labour’s backbencher Kelvin Hopkins turned the clock back further still by asking if Cameron might be seen as “a reincarnation of President Herbert Hoover.” A nice line, until he suggested that Miliband could be “our new Roosevelt.” Even the Labour leader looked embarrassed by that, while a tetchy Cameron – those NHS questions aren’t easy for him - turned on the benign Hopkins for his “greasy” job application.
Greasy or not, on this evidence Miliband is no FDR. “He just does not get it: he is threatening the fabric of the NHS. Does this not show once again that…you can’t trust the Tories on the NHS?” No marks for originality there, but Miliband will have watched the news bulletins closely to see if that one made it. He would do just as well to dig out an old tape of Mrs. Thatcher taking on Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock. These arguments are achingly familiar.
Another pre-scripted question, said the prime minister. Another pre-scripted answer, replied Ed Miliband. Utterly, utterly feeble, added Cameron. But given that both barb and counter-barb were probably pre-scripted in the first place, this was turning into one of the least spontaneous PMQs in memory.
And can something even be pre-scripted? Surely something scripted has already been prepared? Does it really matter if it was? With all the union-bashing and NHS-hating on display, the questions might as well have been written a decade or two ago. Fire up the Quattro indeed.
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