Prime Minister’s Questions today involved a clear clash of ideologies over the always present question of how how much public money should go into our services. Despite the PM’s announcement last week at conference that austerity was ‘over’, Jeremy Corbyn lambasted this claim, saying that many doctors and police officers had been cut since 2010. Although bringing down crime has always been a useful campaigning pledge for the Tories with large knife crime rates across London, Labour could easily now use this against them, and promise more money to the services. The two then clashed over school funding, which Mrs May said is now the highest ever, while Corbyn used the familiar ploy of annoyed teachers, despite many headteachers now having extremely large wages.
This new ‘compassionate conservatism’ might need some work to persuade others, Gerry thinks…