PMQs live: Rishi Sunak to face Keir Starmer as Tories face backlash over small boats plan

Key events

Rishi Sunak to take PMQs

PMQs is about to start.

Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.

PMQs Photograph: HoC

The Conservative party has put out a press release headed: “Conservative Response to Yvette Cooper refusing to say Labour would stop small boats.”

But there is a flaw in the argument. In her interview on the Today programme this morning (actually quoted in the notes accompanying the press release), Cooper, the shadow home secretary, made it clear that Labour is in favour of stopping the boats.

Asked if a Labour government would stop the boats, Cooper replied:

We do believe we need to stop the boats. This is dangerous, it puts lives at risk and it also undermines our border security. So we need strong action.

What commentators are saying about last night's SNP leadership TV debate

Last night the three SNP leadership candidates had their first TV debate. As my colleague Severin Carrell reports in his story about it, the exchanges were “bitter and personal”.

And in her analysis, my colleague Libby Brooks says:

At Tuesday’s first televised debate, after five fairly bland party hustings, the message the three prospective first ministers screamed loud and clear at Scotland was: “We are a party at war with ourselves.”

Those viewers more familiar with the disciplined, “family hold back” approach to public disagreement within the SNP would have been forgiven for adjusting their television sets as the often ferocious STV debate progressed.

Here are some other summaries of the debate from journalists and commentators in Scotland.

(They are all quite harsh, but that has been because I have not been able to find more positive ones. If there are positive write-ups available, do let me know.)

• Chris McCall in the Daily Record says SNP members are furious with what happened. He says:

Some Nationalists were left furious after Kate Forbes launched a scathing attack on Humza Yousaf’s record in government on live TV.

Ash Regan also used the debate to declare the SNP had “lost its way” and flatly rejected the party’s long standing policy of achieving independence through a referendum.

But the STV debate will most likely be remembered for Forbes attacking her Cabinet colleague Yousaf.

She said: “When you were transport minister the trains were never on time. When you were justice minister, the police were strained to breaking point.

“And now as health minister, we’ve got record high waiting times. What makes you think you can do a better job as First Minister?”

• Alistair Grant in the Scotsman says it was a “brutal fight” and that Labour and the Tories must be rubbing their hands with glee.

• Iain Macwhirter, the commentator and writer, says in a Substack post that Kate Forbes was implicitly attacking Nicola Sturgeon’s record. He says:

I’m not sure the SNP are ready for this level of candour about the record of one of the most experienced figures in the Scottish Government. Forbes wasn’t just trashing Humza Yousaf, she was attacking the competence of Saint Nicola herself in placing him in these leading role.

• And Blair McDougall, lead strategist in the No campaign in 2014, says in his Notes on Nationalism substack that the SNP’s opponents will benefit from what Forbes said. He says:

The reaction by many on nationalist social media to Forbes trashing not just her opponent but her own government was furious. It’s hardly surprising that the SNP members who accuse other parties of hating their country, when they hear us speaking out about failures by the SNP, like hearing it even less from their own side. This clip will be played again and again by the SNP’s opponents as they attempt to make Yousaf’s incompetence the dominant frame in people’s minds when they make judgements about whether to support his party. Every new promise he makes of change in the future should be devalued by his failure to keep old pledges.

As Yousaf attempted to use Nicola Sturgeon’s old lines to defend his record running the NHS (it could be worse, we could be England!) Forbes turned that complacency on its head: “Shouldn’t a First Minister have higher ambitions than being slightly better than the rest of the UK?”

If she doesn’t get the job she wants, maybe Forbes can work in the press office of an opposition party because she has a flare for writing crushing anti-SNP rhetoric.

Rob Ford, a politics professor and co-author of Brexitland, a book about the electoral forces behind Brexit, has written a compelling article on Substack on whether Rishi Sunak is likely to gain electorally from his “stop the boats” policy. He concludes he won’t. He says:

One of the greatest advantages governments have is agenda-setting power. They can put the spotlight on popular ideas and vote-winning issues simply by talking about them. “Stop the boats” focuses public and media attention on a pledge that can’t be delivered, on an issue where 80% of voters disapprove of the government’s track record, and which 80% of voters don’t see as a priority. If the government sees this as the best possible use of its agenda-setting power, it is truly in deep trouble.

Do read the whole article, which is here.

In an interview on the Today programme Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said Labour did want to stop small boat crossings. But she said the goverment was being “irresponsible” because it was trying to address the problem with policies that would not work. She said:

I think that they are being irresponsible in the way they’re doing this.

Time and again they go for the gimmicks, they go for the rhetoric, they ramp up the debate on this, but they don’t actually solve the problem.

Yvette Cooper speaking about the illegal migration bill in the Commons yesterday. Photograph: Andy Bailey/UK PARLIAMENT/AFP/Getty Images

The Mail on Sunday columnist Dan Hodges says there are Tory MPs who think that even Suella Braverman does not believe the government’s “stop the boats” plan will work.

What Braverman said on the Today programme this morning about voters knowing by the time of the next election whether the plan has worked or not (see 9.24am) does not prove this theory is right, but it is the sort of thing she would say if it were correct.

Braverman admits as many as 80,000 people could cross Channel on small boats this year

Here are more lines from Suella Braverman’s interviews this morning.

• Braverman admitted that as many as 80,000 people could cross the Channel in small boats this year. The figure is an upper-limit forecast from the Home Office, reported earlier this year. On the Today programme Braverman said that, on the basis of previous years, “we may see in the region of 40,000 people or more” crossing the Channel in 2023. But when it was put to her that the Home Office thought it could be as high as 80,000, she replied:

It may well be. That is a possibility. That is why this action is necessary.

• She rejected suggestions that, under her bill, the government would need to build detention centres able to house around 40,000 asylum seekers. That figure would be a central estimate for the number who might arrive this year. But Braverman said places would not be needed for that many, because the law would have a deterrent effect.

• She rejected claims that Rwanda can only take 200 asylum seekers. That figure, which was used by opposition MPs in the Commons yesterday, is based on Rwanda’s current capacity. She said Rwanda could take thousands of people. She said:

Our scheme with Rwanda is not capped at 200. That is a misunderstanding of our world-leading agreement with our friends in Rwanda. It is an uncapped scheme and therefore there is considerable capacity if we need it in Rwanda for people to be relocated there to lead safe and secure lives.

Asked if Rwanda could take “many thousands” of people, Braverman replied:

Potentially. It is an uncapped scheme and we will decide on the numbers who are relocated there on a case-by-case basis as it evolves.

• She defended her claim to MPs yesterday that up to 100 million might try to come to the UK under current asylum laws. In her opening statement to the Commons yesterday she said:

By some counts there are 100 million people around the world who could qualify for protection under our current laws. And let’s be clear: they are coming here.

Asked about the comment, she told the BBC:

I see my role as being honest … I’m not going to shy away from displaying the enormity of the problem that we are facing.

The UN itself has confirmed there are over 100 million people who are displaced globally, because of all sorts of factors like conflict or persecution … and these are many people who would like to come to the United Kingdom.

• She told Sky News she could not say when new detention centres would be built for asylum seekers. “We’ve got logistical challenges that we’re always overcoming.” This is from Sky’s Sam Coates.

• She said she had issued a statement saying the bill might not be compatible with the Human Rights Act out of “an abundance of caution”. But she claimed she was confident it was legal. She said:

We are confident that we are complying with the law, domestic and international. But we are also pushing the boundaries and we are testing innovative and novel legal arguments.

Braverman would be entitled to say she was hopeful the bill was legal. But, as a senior lawyer pointed out yesterday, on the basis of the legal assessment that she has had, saying the chances of the government losing in the courts are higher than 50%, she is not entitled to say she is confident she is complying with the law.

• She did not deny that she personally favours leaving the European convention on human rights. She has called for this before and, asked if that was still her opionion, she said her views had been “well chronicled”.

Suella Braverman making her statement to MPs yesterday about the illegal migration bill. Photograph: Andy Bailey/UK PARLIAMENT/AFP/Getty Images

Braverman says it was 'irresponsible' for Gary Lineker to say her language about refugees like that used in Nazi Germany

In her interviews this morning Suella Braverman, the home secretary, joined the row about Gary Lineker’s attack on her small boats legislation.

In a tweet yesterday, the Match of the Day presenter described a video by Braverman describing her plans as “beyond awful” and then later said she was using language “not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”.

Asked about the comments on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, Braverman said Lineker was being “irresponsible”. She said:

I’m very disappointed by Gary Lineker’s comments. Equating our measures – which are lawful, necessary and fundamentally compassionate – to 1930s Germany is irresponsible and I disagree with that characterisation.

Asked if he should resign or be sacked, she replied: “That’s a matter for the BBC and they will resolve that.”

She also said Lineker should do a visit to “see what the communities in Kent and Dover and actually all around the UK are feeling about this issue”.

Here is my colleague Caroline Davies’ story about the row.

Suella Braverman has denied the government is breaking the law with its illegal migration bill in interviews this morning. But, as my colleague Aletha Adu reports, Braverman struggled to clarify if the Olympian Sir Mo Farah would have been deported as soon as he turned 18 years old under the proposed regulations.

Braverman says it will be ‘very clear’ to voters at next election if ‘stop the boats’ plan has worked

Good morning. When Rishi Sunak made five pledges in January, four of them looked relatively easy to meet, and one of them looked impossible. He promised to “pass new laws to stop small boats, making sure that if you come to this country illegally, you are detained and swiftly removed”.

Yesterday that new law was published, and, as Rajeev Syal and Kiran Stacey report, there was nothing in the text to persuade critics that they were wrong to assume that legal and other difficulties mean the policy won’t work.

The conventional political response, when challenged about a promise that won’t or can’t be met, is to rely upon some smallprint opt-out. Sunak could say he is only promising to “pass laws”, not to “stop small boats”.

But this government has gone all in on making “stop the boats” the commitment, which raises two questions: when will it happen, and what does success mean? No more small boats at all? A dramatic reduction? Or just a modest reduction?

At his press conference last night Rishi Sunak did not define the target in precise terms, but he said “people will judge us on our results” and that “successes are stopping the boats”. Suella Braverman, the home secretary, has been giving interviews this morning and she was a bit more explicit. Asked if she would admit that she had failed if people were still crossing the Channel at the time of the next election (expected by next autumn), she told the Today programme:

It’s vital that we fix this problem. I think it’ll be very clear by the time of the next election whether we’ve succeeded or not.

Asked again if she was saying there would be no boats by the time of the next election, she again said:

It will be very clear whether we have succeeded or not.

The wording was interesting. Ministers want the plan to succeed, but there does seem to be a split between those who are very confident/hopeful that it will (like Sunak), and those who are less confident, but who think that if it does not work, the Tories can fight an election promising to withdraw Britain from the European convention on human rights. Braverman seems to be in the latter camp, and her answer to this question on the Today programme was consistent with this.

I will post more from her interviews shortly.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland secretary, gives evidence to the Commons Northern Ireland affairs committee about paramilitary activity.

9.45am: The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants gives evidence to the Commons home affairs committee about Windrush. Other witnesses include David Neal, independent chief inspector of borders and immigration at 10.15am, and Lord Murray, a Home Office minister, at 11.15am.

12pm: Rishi Sunak faces Keir Starmer at PMQs.

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