PMQs: Starmer “lefty lawyer standing in our way” on small boats, says Sunak

There was only one topic of debate at today’s PMQs: the government’s new illegal migration bill. Keir Starmer started off the session by accusing the bill’s provisions of “driving a coach and horses through our world leading modern slavery framework”, and repeating the assertion made by Yvette Cooper in the commons yesterday that the bill was a “gimmick”.

The Prime Minister’s main line of attack was that Starmer “has been on the wrong side of this issue his entire career”. Sunak told the commons that Starmer “has never ever voted for tougher asylum laws”; that he “represents the party of free movement”; and that Starmer is “just another lefty lawyer standing in our way”. Given that Suella Braverman estimated, in a letter to MPs, that there was a “more than 50%” chance that the bill would be in contravention of international law, and that the government took the unusual step of issuing the bill with a disclaimer asserting that the Home Secretary is “unable” to guarantee its legality on its front cover, it was somewhat surprising not to see Starmer hitting out at the bill’s legally dubious nature, even more so given Starmer’s previous work as a human rights barrister and Sunak’s statements today about the bill cracking down on “spurious human rights complaints”.

Starmer instead honed in, as Cooper did in her statement yesterday, on the similarity of the pledges being made for this bill to those made for the nationality and borders bill last year and the worsening of the situation under Conservative rule. Starmer said the Prime Minister had “stood there last year saying exactly the same thing. We said it wouldn’t work. They passed the law, the numbers went up”. He declared that the Conservatives were on their “fifth Prime Minister, sixth immigration plan, their seventh Home Secretary” and that all they offered was “gimmicks and empty promises”. Starmer also asserted that the asylum system was “utterly broken on [Sunak’s] watch”.

One of the things that distinguished Starmer’s early PMQs performances as leader of the opposition was his obvious and deep contempt for Sunak’s predecessor-but-one, Boris Johnson. You rarely see this in his sparring matches with Sunak, who generally eschews Johnson’s preferred populist bluster for a kind of professional moderation, in delivery if not in substance. The obvious inhumanity and likely illegality of the proposed bill, however, brought out a little of the previous contempt. Starmer’s charge that the Prime Minister was “absolutely deluded” was delivered with an unusual amount of scorn.