Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer clash over immigration centre scandal at PMQs – UK politics live | Politics

At the post-PMQs lobby briefing the PM’s spokesperson said that Rishi Sunak decided to attend the Cop27 summit after making “good progress” with Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, on this month’s autumn statement. The spokesperson said:

He has always recognised the importance of this summit and indeed on tacking climate change more generally. We wanted to make sure we were making good progress on the government’s domestic agenda and the autumn statement in particular.

Following discussions with the chancellor this week he has now agreed to attend. The prime minister feels there is sufficient space to make this trip.

As PA Media reports, the spokesperson said Sunak was hoping to make progress on the commitment to halt deforestation by 2030 and to agree new partnerships on clean and renewable energy.

At a briefing after PMQs a Labour party spokesperson said that the fact that Rishi Sunak was taking credit for moving asylum seekers into hotel accommodation in the Commons, when during the summer he was calling this process a “farce” (see 1.39pm), showed the government was “in total chaos”. The spokesperson said:

The government is in total chaos.

You have a situation where one of the prime minister’s pledges in the leadership election … was ending the ‘hotel farce’ as he described it, and yet just now in PMQs you have had the prime minister bragging about the number of hotel places that he has agreed in the time that he has been prime minister.

Earlier Bloomberg’s Alex Wickham said that Rishi Sunak had already abandoned two of the promises he made during the summer Tory leadership contest. (See 10.48am.) Wickham missed a third U-turn – abandoning the plan to charge people for missing an appointment with a GP. The summer campaign was the one Sunak lost. During the recent contest, which Sunak won unopposed, Sunak did not make any promises at all.

At the post-PMQs briefing, the PM’s press secretary said all the summer campaign pledges from Sunak have now been shelved. This is from my colleague Pippa Crerar.

The press secretary said:

We are looking at all the campaign pledges and we are looking at whether it is the right time to take them forward.

We need to take some time to make sure what is deliverable and what is possible, and engaging with stakeholders and with the relevant secretaries of state as well.

Obviously, those are pledges that were made a few months ago now and the context is somewhat different, obviously, economically. We need to look again.

She was speaking in response to questions about other promises Sunak made during the summer – embarrassingly – included a pledge saying he was committed to “ending the hotel farce … ending the use of hotels to house migrants by delivering thousands of new beds”. At PMQs today Starmer at one point was telling MPs proudly that the government had procured “more hotels, with 4,500 new beds” to house asylum seekers.

How do you decide who won PMQs? There is no straightforward, a vast array of subjective judgments and assessments come into play, and whatever you write, someone is bound to disagree – but (for the last year or so, at least) there is one failsafe rule that applies; if the Tory PM has to start banging on about Keir Starmer supporting Jeremy Corbyn, then they haven’t won.

That is not to say that some of the things that Starmer said about Corbyn before the 2019 general election are not of some embarrassment to him. It is just that this is such an ancient and feeble attack line that it’s emergence at PMQs is a sure sign that the Tory leader can’t have won, because they did not have anything better to say. Sunak lost because all six questions were on immigration, and he could not defend his party’s record.

But it was worse than that. By my count, Starmer won 6-0, in that, in every exchange, he had the edge. Others might have scored a couple of the exchanges as draws, but in general terms Starmer was clearly dominant. And that is partly because he varied his approach, deploying almost all the PMQs tricks that make a question successful.

He started something very short and direct.

His home secretary says the asylum system is broken. Who broke it?

Then we got what looked like a question, but something that was actually a crisp soundbite neatly summing up his case.

If the asylum system is broken, and his lot have been in power for 12 years, how can it be anyone’s fault but theirs?

Starmer also tried a relatively obscure factual question, that Sunak was unlikely to be able to answer: how many asylum claims from last year have been processed? As is customary, Starmer provided the answer himself.

Four per cent of people arriving in small boats last year had their asylum claim processed. According to the bookies, the home secretary has a better chance of becoming the next Tory leader of processing an asylum claim in a year.

And then Starmer tried an alternative version of the unanswerable question – not on involving an obscure statistic, but one that Sunak had to avoid because the answer would have been incriminating: did Suella Braverman ignore legal advice about moving people out of Manston?

Sunak had his moments. He criticised Labour for not being able to say whether it wanted more or less immigration, and he claimed Starmer did not have his own plan for dealing with the small boat Channel crossings.

Not only does the party opposite not have a plan, they have opposed every single measure we have taken to solve the problem, you can’t attack a plan if you don’t have a plan.

Labour does have a plan – or, at least, enough of a plan to make the Tory claim that it is just in favour of an open border implausible. But, even if they didn’t, Sunak is wrong, because you can attack a plan even if you don’t have your own. Today the Tory record was demolished.