Call the police! Keir Starmer has stolen Rishi Sunak’s clothes

With their plan to treat people smugglers as terrorists, Labour has pulled off the Great Policy Robbery – and won’t stop there, writes John Rentoul

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper visiting the Netherlands, for talks with the EU’s Europol law enforcement agency (PA) (PA Wire)

It is the biggest daylight heist since the Brink’s-Mat job. Keir Starmer has driven his electric 4x4 through the Conservatives’ shop window and made off with all of Rishi Sunak’s policies.

The Labour leader has promised to treat people smugglers as terrorists – in other words, he is copying the Tory policy of making illegal things more illegal. The squeals of outrage from the right-wing press confirm that the robbery has been successful. In fact, just as the Brink’s-Mat robbers thought they were going to steal a million in Spanish pesetas and found an extra £25m in gold bars outside the vault, Starmer may have got away with a lot more than he expected.

He started as a small-time criminal, stealing Tory policies on law and order, promising a crackdown on fly-tipping, but soon graduated to the big stuff. Now Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, says “we don’t have any plans to increase taxes outside of what we’ve said”, and voters are more likely to say Labour is a low-tax party than they are to say that about the Tories.