The significance of the refugee question Keir Starmer failed to ask

Rarely has a question not asked by the leader of the opposition been so deafening. The evidence of the home secretary’s heartlessness and incompetence seemed so overwhelming that it must have required a heroic effort of will for Keir Starmer to avoid asking a question about Britain’s policy towards Ukrainian refugees.

Yet Starmer summoned his reserves of resolution and asked about energy bills instead. This is an important question, and it was a sharp twist to ask Boris Johnson when he was going to force Rishi Sunak to make a U-turn on his “buy now, pay later” policy of lending people help with their gas bills.

Johnson waffled in reply, at one point theatrically pretending to think that Starmer was demanding that the government reverse its policy of helping people with their bills – “He must be out of his mind.” The prime minister knows perfectly well that he and Sunak are indeed likely to pump yet more money into subsidising people’s bills.

Starmer bolted for the safety of demanding a windfall tax on oil and gas companies, forcing Johnson into one of the least comfortable positions for a British politician in public: defending profit as a source of investment. A windfall tax would raise prices, he said, and make it harder for companies to diversify from Russian gas, which is what we want them to do.

Starmer ignored this point, knowing that he was on safe ground with public opinion, and demanded new nuclear power and more onshore wind. “New nuclear?” exclaimed the prime minister, launching into a pantomime routine that consisted of mocking Labour’s equivocations about nuclear power and thanking Starmer for his support.

“Come off it,” said Starmer, appearing to be genuinely irritated. “Labour is pro-nuclear; this prime minister can’t get a single brick laid of a new nuclear plant.”

The rest of their exchanges were the traditional futile Punch and Judy routine, as Johnson blamed the last Labour government for running down nuclear power capacity and Starmer said the Tories had had 12 years.

After that, Prime Minister’s Questions proper could begin. Ian Blackford, the Westminster leader of the Scottish National Party, asked about refugees. It was a long question fuelled by righteous moral indignation about the government’s claim to be leading the response to the crisis while issuing only a few hundred visas to people fleeing Ukraine.

Johnson said the Home Office had issued “almost a thousand” visas “as I speak”. The number will rise “very sharply”, he said; it is “uncapped”, and he expects the numbers to be taken in by the UK to “rise into the region of hundreds of thousands”.

He said the government has a “proud, proud record”, and repeated the misleading claim that “we have done more than any other European government to resettle vulnerable people since 2015”. This is a reference to Britain’s small “settled status” scheme, which pales into insignificance against the huge numbers of refugees actually accepted by Poland and Germany.

To keep up to speed with all the latest opinions and comment sign up to our free weekly Voices Dispatches newsletter by clicking here

But Johnson did have one response that carried emotional punch, when he said: “This is a government unlike any other” in which “the prime minister, deputy prime minister and home secretary are directly descended from refugees”. In his case, this referred to Ali Kemal, his great-grandfather who fled the Ottoman empire in 1909.

“We understand how much refugees have to give to this country,” he said. It had nothing to do with the bureaucratic obstacles put in the way of Ukrainians hoping to follow in Kemal’s footsteps, but usefully, from Johnson’s point of view, it pre-empted the next question pleading for a more humane policy towards refugees, which was asked by Julian Smith, the Northern Ireland secretary sacked by the prime minister two years ago.

Smith was followed up by Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, and Ronnie Cowan, another SNP MP, who also asked variations of the Big Question of the Day and got roughly the same answer about Britain being “out in front”, “leading in every respect” in the response to the refugee crisis.

Johnson’s claims were shameless, but the real significance of today’s Prime Minister’s Questions was the question not asked by Starmer. Read into it what you will, but the Labour leader clearly wanted to avoid identifying his party too closely with the demand for unrestricted access for Ukrainian refugees.

He appears to believe that the wave of sympathy in British public opinion for the plight of refugees may not be sustained as the numbers fleeing the conflict rise. Leaving the question to be asked by Scottish nationalists, Liberal Democrats and One Nation Tories was a brutal exercise in unsentimental politics.