PMQs 18 January 2012 Liveblog

Second PMQs Of 2012 - Who Will Come Out On Top?

The second PMQs of 2012 wasn't the most fiery we've ever seen, but was a better performance from Ed Miliband compared to last week., and really if he'd failed to get one over Cameron this week things would have been even more worrying - when unemployment stats as awful as today's come out on the same morning, it should always be an easy win for the Leader of the Opposition.

We watched as David Cameron reeled off a litany of initiatives - the apprenticeships roll-out, the Work Programme and the fiscal discipline that - the PM claims - has led to the continuing low interest rates.

All of these things, Cameron insists, will lead to unemployment beginning to fall. The trouble for Cameron is he doesn't know when these schemes will begin to bear fruit - if ever, and that makes it hard for him to hit back against Milband.

It was also interesting to see coalition MPs - Andrew George for the Lib Dems and Karen Lumley for the Tories - laying into key coalition policies, NHS reform and the child benefit cap respectively. Both their hostile questions drew murmurs from the House.

A Lib Dem moaning is nothing particularly exciting, but a female Tory MP complaining about child benefit is giving voice to a sense of outrage felt by many of her colleagues on the backbenches.

One quite interesting point was a question from Aidan Burley, the "Nazi-party" Tory MP who lost his junior job a few weeks ago. He asked a question about a boy who was kidnapped and taken to Thailand and almost sold into slavery. This highly-non political question quickly silenced the jeers from Labour. We wonder whether this was the first step on the long - very long - road to Burley's political rehabilitation.

Here's the highlights of today's PMQS:

Close

What's Hot