Prime Minister’s Questions was unusually feisty for a pre-Budget session. It covered the two big political rows of the week on the Illegal Migration Bill and Gary Lineker, both of which elicited a tribal response from both Conservative and Labour benches.
The session started with a particularly angry question from Labour’s Jess Phillips about a tweet from Rishi Sunak which threatened those who had come to the UK illegally with not being able to use modern slavery protections – even if they are trafficked women being raped repeatedly. Phillips drew from her own experience working in the domestic abuse sector, and told Sunak that his tweet would be shown to victims by people traffickers as evidence that no one would come to help them.
As Sunak replied, the Labour MP shouted with frustration, heckling him as he sat down with something that sounded like she was accusing him of being happy for the victims to carry on being raped. There was a sharp intake of breath from across the House – and then the immigration debate continued with the next question from Tory MP Danny Kruger. He rallied the Conservative benches by accusing opposition MPs of wanting higher immigration. A number of SNP members shouted back that they did.
So by the time Keir Starmer got to his feet, the Chamber was energised. The Labour leader used all six of his questions to accuse the Tories of trying to undermine the impartiality of the BBC. His opening question was: ‘The Prime Minister claimed he wanted to protect free speech and put a stop to no platforming. So how concerned was he by last week’s campaign by Tory MPs to cancel a broadcaster?’ Starmer described the response to Gary Lineker’s tweet about the Illegal Migration Bill as ‘snowflake MPs’ who were ‘desperately trying to cancel a football highlight show’, and Sunak of hiding behind ‘playground bullies’. He asked whether the Prime Minister had received assurances that no one linked to the Tory party had been lobbied by Tory MPs to effectively cancel Match of the Day.
Sunak was largely dismissive in his responses, saying ‘it’s right that the BBC as an important institution takes his obligations to impartiality seriously, that I care about the integrity, impartiality of institutions, the BBC, but also the civil service’. At one point he tried to muddy the waters by claiming that a number of Labour frontbenchers had criticised Lineker’s language too. This allowed Starmer to hit back that the Prime Minister didn’t understand that there was a difference between disagreeing with what someone said and then trying to stop them from saying it.
What was the point of this session? Well, in the scheme of the day or even this week, not much, because the Budget is now being unveiled and will dominated the news agenda. But there is genuine concern in Labour that the Conservatives are trying to undermine the impartiality of the BBC in the run-up to the next election. This session was an attempt to put down a marker on this which Starmer will return to when there is more space for the row again.
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