Another week, another Prime Minister’s Questions featuring the two party leaders trading exactly the same insult: you don’t believe in anything. Keir Starmer wanted to argue that Rishi Sunak didn’t believe in his own Rwanda policy, while the Prime Minister tried to claim that the Labour leader would say anything to get what he needed at any given moment in time.
Starmer entered the chamber with the upper hand, given the turmoil in the Tory party over Rwanda. He maintained it throughout the session, painting the Rwanda policy as ridiculous and inviting MPs to laugh at the Prime Minister as often as possible. He labelled the deportation policy a ‘farce’, and opened with a jokey question about whether the government had found the 4,250 asylum seekers who had disappeared. ‘Has he found them yet?’ he asked, to laughter.
It scarcely needed Starmer to point out that Sunak hadn’t answered the question
Sunak responded that ‘in spite of him blocking every single attempt that we have taken’, the government’s plan on immigration was working. ‘On this side of the House, we want to stop the boats. We have a plan, it’s working and under him we would just go back to square one.’ That last sentence is Sunak’s (current) election pitch: we’ll finish the job while Labour would take us back to square one.
It scarcely needed Starmer to point out that Sunak hadn’t answered the question, but he did anyway in order to make the story bigger. ‘My first thought is: how do you actually lose 4,250 people?’ He listed other examples of what he saw as being government incompetence, including HS2 spending and the row over the Elgin marbles. ‘Of course this farce of a government could lose the people it was planning to remove! He didn’t answer the questions, so I’ll ask him again. Where are the 4,250 people that the government has lost? Where are they?’
Sunak responded that the government had ‘actually identified and removed over 20,000 people’. That still wasn’t an answer, but Sunak decided to move on to defending his Rwanda policy overall. ‘He doesn’t actually care about solving this problem,’ he added, pointing to Starmer’s insistence that he would reverse the Rwanda policy even if small boat crossings fell.
The Labour leader repeated the ‘farce’ line, and offered more details of the way the Rwanda policy wasn’t working and didn’t make any sense. Then he asked the same question again, labouring heavily over the ‘4,250 people’. ‘It’s the same thing again and again!’ retorted Sunak, who insisted once again that the numbers of people coming here had fallen and that Starmer would still scrap the plan. ‘It’s because he has no values, no conviction and no plan. It is back to square one!’
Starmer kept going. ‘He hasn’t got a clue where they are, has he? I can tell you one place they aren’t – and that’s Rwanda! The only people he sends to Rwanda are cabinet ministers.’ Labour MPs laughed theatrically as he made these points. He then described ‘hundreds of bald men scrapping over a single comb’ in the Conservative party as he claimed Sunak didn’t believe in the Rwanda policy anyway.
Sunak had come ready for that accusation, given it was levelled at him last week too. He produced a book on European human rights law written by Starmer, saying it showed he was more interested ‘in lefty lawyers’ because he had written a textbook for them. The Speaker then objected to him using props in the house. Starmer dismissed it as ‘pathetic nonsense’. It looked rather like the printout of the book cover that Sunak had produced: a bit thin.
Sunak had another go on the inconsistency point, claiming that while Starmer had called for the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir to be proscribed, he had ‘personally used the European Court of Human Rights to try and stop them being banned’. He didn’t wave the press release that he quoted, but it was from the extremist group. ‘When I see a group chanting jihad on our streets, I ban them, he invoices them!’
Often when voters complain that politicians are all the same, it’s because they’re not paying attention to the vast policy differences between the parties. Today, those who did tune in will have left with the conclusion that they really are identical, both in their flaws and their insults.
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