‘Stop the boasts’ is a good soundbite on immigration, but what would Labour actually do?

Would Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper really be any better at dealing with asylum applications, asks John Rentoul

It is only in government that Starmer and Cooper will be in a position to negotiate with the French and the EU (PA)

Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, knows how to wound. She told Rishi Sunak he should “stop the boasts”. That play on words strikes at the heart of the prime minister’s error of judgement.

He should never have promised to “stop” the boats, because cutting the number by one-third looks like a failure instead of reasonable progress in dealing with a difficult problem. If he had promised to “tackle” the boats, the British public would hardly regard his record last year as a success but Cooper’s attack would have stung a little less.

As for Sunak’s boast of having cleared the “legacy” backlog of asylum claims by the turn of the year, Cooper is again playing politics on easy mode. How insulting can the prime minister be to think that by setting an arbitrary date and promising to process all applications made before it, while applications after the date continue to pile up, he can say “job done”?