Yvette Cooper

I must have missed a bit of the shadow Home Secretary’s response—the bit, maybe at the beginning, when he apologised to the House and the country for his party’s policies, which quadrupled net migration in just four years. He tells us his concerns about the level of migration; his party is responsible for that huge increase in net migration. I must have also missed the bit when the shadow Home Secretary confessed that from the point at which he became an immigration Minister in 2020—when all these policies were introduced—to the point at which the shadow Justice Secretary, the right hon. Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick), finished being immigration Minister in 2023, net migration rose from 170,000 a year to 870,000 a year. I must have missed that confession, and that apology, which the shadow Home Secretary should have made. Until he admits his failure and apologises for the damage and chaos that he and his party caused, no one will take seriously a single word that he says. The shadow Home Secretary referred to visa changes that were made before the election. We supported changes made by the right hon. Member for Braintree (Sir James Cleverly), but he had to reverse some of the changes that the shadow Home Secretary made when he was an immigration Minister. As for a cap, the White Paper provides for caps on low-skilled migration on the temporary shortage list. The right hon. Gentleman’s targets and caps are as meaningless as all the other ones that his party introduced when they were in government. Indeed, let me quote from the time of the Conservative Government’s reforms that caused a lot of these problems: “I especially thank the Home Secretary for removing the annual limits on work visas and on international students: I lobbied for both”.—[Official Report, 19 December 2018; Vol. 651, c. 815.] That was the current Leader of the Opposition, so the idea that that lot have anything to offer is like people who burgle your house and then turn up the next day and offer to sell you a dog. If the Conservatives are serious about making the changes and serious about tackling small boats, they should vote for our counter-terrorism powers to tackle the smuggler gangs that the right hon. Gentleman and the other right-wing parties have repeatedly voted against. That is not serious. This Government are.