Keir Starmer took aim at Suella Braverman today, telling Rishi Sunak at PMQs that he should get “a proper home secretary”.
Starmer’s attack comes as the UK faces a migrant crisis, with thousands arriving across the Channel on small boats every week, and continued overcrowding in migrant centres and a lack of hotel accommodation.
“His home secretary says the asylum system is broken,” Starmer said in his first question, “who broke it?”.
Sunak’s response saw him criticise Labour for voting against measures to deal with the crisis.
Repeating the same attack line he used last week, the Labour leader then accused Sunak of making a “grubby deal” to reappoint Braverman, in order to secure support, and “dodge an election.”
Doubling down, Starmer joked that Braverman has a better chance of becoming Tory leader than of “processing an asylum claim in a year”.
Although the PM conceded that migrant Channel crossings were a “serious and escalating problem,” he retorted that the home secretary is taking steps to deal with the situation, including increasing staff numbers at the Manston centre by almost half.
When Starmer claimed that Braverman was “putting our security at risk,” Sunak hit back that Starmer had “rightly raised the topic of national security”, reminding the Labour leader that he had supported Jeremy Corbyn in 2019.
Having made a similar point at the last PMQs, Sunak said “we will remind him every week”. Let’s hope the PM and Starmer don’t keep up this habit of repeating their lines as they will both end up sounding like broken records
