The general rule of politics that you should never interrupt your opponent when he’s busy digging his own grave is one Sir Keir Starmer has taken to heart. Yesterday, his gag at Prime Minister’s Questions was: “Christmas is a time of peace on earth and good will to all. Has anyone told the Tory party?” Yes, yes. Quite so.
But if we could, just for a moment, drag ourselves away from the faction-fighting in the Conservative Party to contemplate Labour and Sir Keir, who would replace it, the scenario isn’t a happy one. On the crucial question that’s dominated politics for a whole two weeks, illegal migration, Sir Keir has precisely nothing to offer.
He would scrap the plan to deter illegal migrants by sending them to Rwanda even if — consider this — it turned out to work. And his alternative? We don’t know. He toys with the idea of processing migrants abroad, but with nothing so vulgar as actual detail. This matters. The man wants to be prime minister in an election that’s a year away, but when it comes to describing what he would actually do if running the country — rather than just opposing government plans to deal with the inexorable number of cross-Channel arrivals — we are left with a big fat vacuum.
What would Sir Keir, PM, look like? Labour is 20 points ahead in the polls so we really should know. Specifically what would he look like on immigration, legal and illegal, the issue that matters most to the Tory voters he has to win over in a real election? There’s a little ditty that goes, “Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today./I wish that man would go away.” And the man who isn’t there is Sir Keir Starmer, PM. We don’t know anything of him.
But in fact, what seems pretty clear is that he would be worse on immigration than the Government. Opposing the Rwanda Bill, he declared: “It is against our values. That does not mean we don’t recognise the challenge that there is of crossing on small boats across the Channel. We have to stop that. But stopping that means not gimmicks, but rolling our sleeves up with a practical plan that will actually work.”
Which is what, exactly? So far, we know that he would “break the gangs”, that is, of people smugglers. But you know something? The Government has thought of that. It is trying to stop the people smugglers. But that glib answer hasn’t worked. It hasn’t deterred individuals from attempting the crossing. And you know why? Because figures released yesterday showed that of the people who come here illegally, one in 100 will be sent back. And that’s of the arrivals we actually know about. That’s right. One per cent. The Home Office has returned 1,182 of the 111,833 migrants who have crossed the Channel over the past three years. And that’s under a government that actually aspires to bring numbers down.
If Sir Keir has a “practical plan that will actually work” to reverse that, maybe he could share it with the rest of us? He doesn’t. Because he doesn’t have one.
And it’s the same with legal migration. The figure of 1.2 million people who arrived here last year — or three-quarters of a million net in the year to June — bothers most voters. From the days of Sir Tony Blair, who first opened up the valves on immigration, we’ve come to this unimaginably large number. Reversing it will take hard-headed policies like reducing the number of dependents people coming here are allowed to bring with them. It means paying people in social care enough money to attract Brits to do this crucial, undervalued work — which means looking hard at how the NHS billions are spent. But is there any sign that Labour is going even to try? Not that I see.
Sir Keir has adopted the safety-first policy of saying as little as possible in order to focus on the more congenial job of criticising the Government
Sir Keir has adopted the safety-first policy of saying as little as possible in order to focus on the more congenial job of criticising the Government. But we do have some indication of what Labour in government might look like and that’s from its record where it actually has been in power. And that is perhaps why Sir Keir, showing a ruthlessness that belies his past as a human rights lawyer, has thrown Mark Drakeford, First Minister in Wales, from a great height. And the defenestration wasn’t in the least mitigated by him calling him “a Titan of Welsh politics”.
Bluntly, Labour in Wales has had a terrible record: worse NHS waiting times than in England where the Government runs the show, and in the latest international comparisons, education in Wales is way, way, worse than in England.
And what is it about this example of Labour in government that might make voters want to replicate it elsewhere? Don’t ask.
But reality is going to bite. The election can be at most just over a year away. Sir Keir is going to be subjected to the kind of forensic scrutiny he’s never had so far. He can’t get away by merely asserting that by virtue of not being Rishi Sunak he’d do better. To take one tiny example, Labour was proposing giving 16 and 17-year-olds the vote — is that still a runner? My daughter is 17 and even she thinks it’s a rubbish idea. But there’s lots more where that came from. The worrying thing is that Sir Keir, in all his reassuring, Tin Man robot demeanour, heads a party with its old instincts in check for now.
Come the election, Sir Keir is going to have to take ownership of his own policies, specifically on migration. Where would he process asylum claims? Would he really revoke the Rwanda deportations if they worked? What about those EU governments that are now considering the same policy? How, if numbers actually increased under Labour, would he reverse them? What about his suggestion that, in order to gain favour with the EU, he might accept 100,000 migrants a year from the continent? And what would the closer relationship with the EU he promised look like? The Red Wall would like to know.
He’s done very well, has Sir Keir, out of being The Man Who Wasn’t There, the PM in waiting who doesn’t say what he would look like in the job. But he’s about to be brought to account. Labour’s been ahead in the polls for two years now; well, let’s see what Sir Keir is, rather than isn’t. The voters would like to know.
