Whisper it, but Labour don’t have a plan to fix this Tory mess either

Clunky Keir Starmer spent PMQs trumpeting away at ‘the Tory mortgage penalty’ and moneybags Rishi Sunak, but for all his bluster the would-be PM is noticeably thin on ideas of his own, writes John Rentoul

Keir Starmer said Sunak had a keen interest in the mortgage market in California, and that he was too removed in his helicopter from the lived experience of those on the ground (PA)

It was effective, but it wasn’t pretty. Keir Starmer repeatedly referred to “the Tory mortgage penalty”, which he said was caused by “Tory economic failure”. This is facile sloganising rather than economic analysis – even if it seemed to hit the mark.

The irony is that a Labour government would have done no differently in recent years. Labour supported the furlough scheme during the pandemic and advocated energy bill subsidies shortly before the government brought them in. Those are two big causes of the weakness of the public finances and, as Rishi Sunak said, the problems of high inflation and interest rates are common to most countries.

The prime minister didn’t admit that the UK’s situation seems worse than that in many countries, choosing instead to cherry-pick statistics about interest rates being similar in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. But the reasons for differential economic performance between countries are complicated, and Starmer did not identify any policy decisions since Brexit – and he was certainly at pains not to mention Brexit – that had caused the UK’s relatively poor performance.