David Cameron has dodged questions on whether the UK’s poorest will still be negatively affected tax credit cuts.
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The Labour leader won praise in Westminster for choosing to focus on planned cuts to tax credits, which have been thrown into chaos following embarrassing defeats for the government in the House of Lords.
Cameron continued the defence of tax credit cuts by highlighting them as a package of balancing measures, insisting that initiatives such as the proposed introduction of the Living Wage will offset, or at least lessen, the impact which the controversial cuts will inevitably have on millions of families.
Mr Cameron replied: “What I can guarantee is we remain committed to the vision of a high pay, low tax, lower welfare economy”.
Yet Corbyn stood defiant. Meanwhile the prime minister’s personal rating has fallen to minus 6 – down from a positive rating of plus 3 last month. These were the six questions, with Cameron’s responses.
The Labour leader then pressed Cameron on Michael Gove’s pre-election promise that tax credits would not be cut if the Conservatives gained power. But Corbyn nonetheless performed well, rising above the customary partisan bickering which constantly interrupts the weekly exchange, with a tranquil, motionless, yet resolute stance. Twas ever thus, but today’s batch of Conservative questions really were the worst for a while, ranging from a question about tractor production in Basildon that meant Cameron could joke about the Soviet Union and Seumas Milne to vague queries about whether the Prime Minister agreed that things were going really well in certain constituencies.
Mr Cameron replied by hitting out at the House of Lords for defying MPs by voting down the cuts to tax credits introduced via a so-called statutory instrument.
He said: “This is not a constitutional crisis, this is a crisis for 3 million families in this country”.
Mr Corbyn said the session was created to put questions to the Prime Minister “on behalf of the people of this country” – before taking a long pause in the face of Tory heckling.
Following an intervention from the Speaker to calm rowdy proceedings, he added: “Every penny we don’t save on welfare is savings we have to find in the education budget or the policing budget or in the health budget”. “When is he going to stop his deficit denial, get off the fence and tell us what he would do?”
“Can he give a cast iron guarantee to Karen and all the other families who are very anxious about what is going to happen next April to their income, and how they are going to make ends meet. I hope he will. I ask him for the sixth time: please give us an answer to a very straightforward, simple question”.
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The Prime Minister accused the Labour leader of having a “deficit-denying, borrow forever plan”.
