Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch had quite an angry clash at today’s Prime Minister’s Questions. The Tory leader attacked on immigration, something Starmer had previously mocked her for avoiding. The questions and answers quickly descended into a bit of a grudge match about who actually cared about it.
Badenoch’s first question was why immigration had not been named as a priority when Starmer ‘relaunched yet again’ last week. Starmer immediately crowed that ‘now she wants to talk about immigration’, accusing the Conservatives of a ‘one nation experiment in open borders’. He had a good line – though didn’t deliver it particularly well – that Badenoch was ‘furious about what she was campaigning for’, something Labour is regularly accusing key Tories including Badenoch and Claire Coutinho of doing.
Badenoch’s response was to argue that Starmer was much worse, saying: ‘He talks about open borders, he was the one campaigning for free movement!’ She returned to letters Starmer had written against the deportation of foreign criminals, something Rishi Sunak had also used when he was sparring against Starmer. Back Starmer went to his accusations about how badly the Conservatives failed on migration. So in her next question, Badenoch ramped up her attack. ‘This is a ludicrous assertion,’ she told the Commons. ‘He is the one who was repeatedly signing letters – he even asked us to pause all deportations – he doesn’t want to talk about the past, Mr Speaker, but that letter is just the tip of the iceberg. There is more.‘ Her voice throbbed at that point, like someone in the middle of a real argument, rather than what can often be a staged piece of parliamentary theatre. She then demanded to know why Starmer wouldn’t commit to a cap on migration.
To groans from MPs, Starmer reminded everyone that he had been the Director of Public Prosecutions for five years. ‘While she was talking, I was actually doing the hard yards of convicting those who should be in prison. She presided over record numbers of asylum seekers in this country, a record number of lawful and irregular migrants. That is 14 years when they lost control of the borders. They set a cap for each of those 14 years, it wasn’t hard, it didn’t stop people coming and it got a record number and they should apologise for what they’ve done with their open borders policy.’
The leader of the opposition then returned to her own refrain that Starmer doesn’t answer any questions. ‘He did not answer a single question, he never answers questions. He wants to talk about the past, the fact is we have acknowledged where things have gone wrong, he will never take responsibility! He will never take responsibility.’ The Prime Minister replied that he wanted to smash the gangs, Badenoch shot back that ‘the only thing he has smashed is his own reputation’. Starmer demanded that she welcome the agreements he had struck on tackling people smuggling, Badenoch returned that the numbers kept going up. Anyone watching the session will have seen two people fighting over who was just a bit worse than the other, which underlines why Reform is polling so well at the moment.
The rest of the session saw a number of questions about farms, and Starmer looking uncomfortable about the figures once again. He never looks or sounds at all confident when reeling out his assertion that the threshold of £3 million for inheritance tax means the vast majority of family farms will not be affected, and frequently hesitates over that figure, almost for fear he’s got it wrong. At one point, he faced accusations by Conservative MP Jerome Mayhew that he was running a ‘duplicitous’ administration after reassuring farmers before the election that he understood how important family farms were. But despite seeming shaky on the figures, the Prime Minister is still sticking to his guns on the reforms to inheritance tax, clearly feeling it is a battle he can afford to have.
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