Migration is dominating Sunak’s premiership – but the pressure on Starmer may be even greater | Martin Kettle

For Keir Starmer, the Tory party is the gift that keeps on giving. If Labour has one overriding wish as the start of general election year approaches, it is that Rishi Sunak’s party should continue to remind voters why they have given up on the Conservatives after electing them in such numbers in 2019. On Tuesday, in the Commons, the Tory party delivered handsomely on that Labour wish.

As well as days of buildup, every newsflash throughout Tuesday was about Tory division and Tory difficulty. There hasn’t been a spotlit display of Conservative dysfunction like this for, well, several weeks. It may not have been a gamechanging horror show on the scale of Partygate in 2021 or the Truss emergency budget in 2022. But it was a reminder that the Bertha Mason version of his party that Sunak tries to keep locked in the parliamentary attic is alive and well and ready to burn down the house if it gets the chance.

From the point of view of the 2024 election contest – and frankly that’s the only point of view that matters right now to Labour – Christmas has arrived early for Starmer. Yesterday, though, Labour was presented with another, less spectacular piece of potential electoral bounty in the news that the economy contracted by 0.3% in October. In the end, this may prove to be the most ominous event of the toughest week of Sunak’s prime ministership.

You can safely forget the fact that Sunak actually won the second reading vote on the safety of Rwanda bill quite comfortably. Even allowing for a bit of media sour grapes that the outcome was not more dramatic, the government’s win simply prolongs the agony. It ensures that the splits will return again in the new year at the Commons committee stage, which will take place in the full chamber and then in the Lords.

Sunak’s so-called promise to tighten the already hyper-harsh bill is certain to fall short of the even harsher changes that William Cash and his acolytes want him to concede. For Cash, this week was not actually about Rwanda at all, let alone about migration, asylum seekers or stopping the boats. His fixation, as always – in which he has ensnared his motley band of rightwing blowhards – is with creating a form of untrammelled parliamentary sovereignty from which the courts, foreign or British, are entirely purged.

Sunak’s bill comes quite close to creating that. Crucially, though, it balks at banishing the courts in every conceivable circumstance. That’s partly because Rwanda won’t otherwise agree; Kigali’s strategy of taking a few of the west’s migrants in return for large amounts of the west’s cash depends on such deals staying within legal norms. But this is also a red line for the Tory party’s less doctrinaire lawyers and for its remaining liberals.

Sunak is boxed in. As a result, it is hard now to see how the Tory party’s sovereigntist wing and the rightwing newspapers that urge it on to further cruelties can muster enough numbers to get their way. The second reading was their big chance, and they bottled it. They are doomed by their obsessions to try again, but as long as Sunak stands firm, they are also fated to fail. Their best opportunity may come at third reading.

All this ensures exactly what Labour most wants – another well-advertised display of Tory backbench delirium and party fracture for the nation to shake its head at. A long succession of similar events has fed Labour’s more than two-year lead in the opinion polls. This week may have topped up that lead again.

For Starmer, the prospect could hardly be more appetising. With the economy stagnating and the NHS stretched to its winter limits, stopping the boats has sometimes seemed like the only card that Sunak had left to play. If that too is now defined as a policy failure owned by the Tories, Starmer will enter the final straight with power clearly in Labour’s sights.

Yet if Starmer is soon going to be in government, he is soon going to own Britain’s migration policy. In terms of campaigning tradecraft, Labour has done a brilliant job of ensuring that the spotlight has stayed on the Tories so far. But that will end as soon as Starmer crosses the No 10 threshold. Migration will then instantly become his problem and the spotlight will shift to Labour.

In Tuesday’s debate, backbench Conservatives repeatedly tried to ask Labour what it would do. Labour’s frontbenchers Yvette Cooper and Stephen Kinnock had some answers: strengthen border security by increasing police numbers, push Europol to go after the migrant trafficking gangs, clear the asylum backlog by removing the 40,000 people who have had their claims rejected but are still in Britain, and recruit 1,000 more caseworkers.

In this week’s context, these responses were sufficient. Labour’s goal was to keep the focus on the Conservatives. But this won’t suffice once Labour is in power. Pledges such as strengthening border security, going after the gangs, clearing the backlog and saving taxpayers’ money are all very well as far as they go. But they are very general.

The granular detail of migration policy management and enforcement is an altogether different and more difficult world. The Starmer government’s honeymoon, assuming it even has one, may be short. Its migration and asylum policies will soon be judged against their delivery, against the boats, against the numbers actually coming into Britain, and against any migration and asylum legislation that Labour chooses to repeal or to enact. It could be a pitiless shift for Labour’s ministers and its MPs.

Importantly, the political contest will quickly transform, too. If the Conservatives are battered in the election, Sunak will step down. Whoever succeeds him will lead a party instantly freed from responsibility and in which pressure for an even more draconian migration policy offer will be strong. Even if the next Tory leader is not Suella Braverman, the pressure for a Nigel Farage- or Geert Wilders-style offer on migration will be difficult to resist. If the next leader is Braverman, there will be no resistance to it at all.

Look at the migration policy pressures that are now bearing down on centrist governments in countries including France, Germany and the United States. The same thing is certain to occur here. In a better economic situation than it will inherit, Labour might hope to head off a populist revolt on migration with spending pledges and handouts. Those are not on the cards. Is Labour ready for the kind of contest that awaits it in office? It certainly needs to be, because the migration battleground could become even bloodier than it is already – and very quickly.