BREAKING: Labour Minister DEFIES Starmer on immigration as Andy Burnham 'PROXY WAR' breaks out

Well, they say treason doth never prosper, for when it doth, none dare call it treason. And this all seemed to be going swimmingly for the Labour Party, that they assassinated a Prime Minister, they had a new Prime Minister in waiting, and they could try and pretend that it was a nest of singing birds, that everyone was happy with it. As they all ran round, Mr Burnham sucked up to him like the billiards, said how much they were supporting him, how marvellous they'd always thought he was, until you get down to policy. And Mike Tapp, a Minister in the Home Office, has come up with an immigration policy that is not the Government's. Now, collective responsibility is the fundamental constitutional basis of Cabinet Government. They have to agree one policy, every Minister speaks for the Government, the Government speaks with one voice. That has been fundamental to our Constitution since at least the 1830s. Mike Tapp thinks otherwise. But Shabana Mahmood isn't best pleased, and Shabana Mahmood wants him sacked and says he's broken the Ministerial Code. Now the Ministerial Code is the Prime Minister's Code of Conduct for Ministers. It's not an official state document, it's not a constitutional document, it's just what the Prime Minister wants to happen. And he is the interpreter of it, the guardian of it, and he's saying he doesn't want to fire Mr Tapp. So you're now beginning to see those real tensions come out, and they come down to policy. Shabana Mahmood wants a tough immigration policy. She wants to clamp down on people, she wants to change the terms and conditions of people being in this country. Mike Tapp has come up with a more left-wing solution. He doesn't want to be as tough-minded, he's not as worried about it. This expresses the view of a lot of people in the Labour Party who, frankly, want open borders, and the Prime Minister, well, he's never been able to do anything, even when he had authority, and now he's sitting in Downing Street dithering a little bit longer. But what does Mr Burnham think? And that, unfortunately, isn't very clear, because he's hinted possibly everything to everybody over the course of his political career, though a few months ago he did back Angela Rayner when she said that Shabana Mahmood's reforms weren't British. So chaos, confusion, dither, and a constitutional mini-crisis, all brewing up at once. Politics remains interesting as ever. Let me know what you think, melmog, at gbnews.com. But now I'm very pleased to be joined by a friend of the programme and chief political commentator at The Independent, John Rental. John, can you explain what's going on to me and to my viewers, please? I'm afraid I can't, because what Mike Tapp has done seems rather out of character for him. I mean, I really admire him. I thought the whole point of having a blue Labour person like him in the Home Office was to strengthen Shabana's extremely robust policy on immigration, not to undermine it. I can't understand why he suddenly decided to align with the soft left and call for social care workers to be exempt from these ILR changes. I mean, it doesn't make sense to me. I mean, I disagree with him and you about the fact that, I mean, he says there should be a general election if you change prime minister in between elections. I don't agree with that and I don't agree with this. So I had great hopes of him, but they've been dashed. OK, well, I seem to agree with him on one thing but not on the other. I certainly think that the mandates become more personal and I'm in favour of an election. I've been saying this even when it was disadvantageous to the Tories, not just out of political opportunism. But is he positioning himself for a Burnham government? Is he trying to get a better job by putting himself where Burnham was six months ago? Well, possibly, except that, as you rightly point out, Jacob, Andy Burnham has moved since then and said that he approves of Shabana Mahmood's policies, although he's left a bit of wriggle room to tweak the details. But, you know, exempting social care workers from the right to remain changes is not tweaking a detail. I mean, that would just be undermining the whole point of what Shabana Mahmood's trying to do, which is to ensure that the so-called Boris wave, the large number of people who came into the country under Boris Johnson's government, can't get permanent rights to settle as quickly as they once could. And I think she's absolutely right in that and I don't know what Mike Tapp's playing at. But it's very odd, isn't it? I can't remember a previous occasion when a junior minister has publicly disagreed with the Secretary of State that these disagreements are usually played out in private. And for a Secretary of State to call for one of her junior ministers to be fired is something I can't think of a precedent for. No, I don't remember anything like that at all. I mean, it just goes to show, I think, what a febrile moment we are in between prime ministers. And Mike Tapp obviously thinks that he can gain some advantage by getting himself sacked or by prompting Shabana Mahmood to say that she wants him sacked. Maybe he knows something we don't about where Andy Burnham stands and maybe he's had some kind of understanding that he's going to get some kind of promotion from the new government. But it doesn't seem to add up. No, and all the pundits are saying Shabana Mahmood's going to carry on as Home Secretary, in which case he's risking being sacked and being permanently out because she will now not allow him to get back as far as a minister has a veto on another minister. But she's pretty important and senior. Absolutely. I mean, and Mike Tapp is extremely junior. He's at the bottom level. I mean, I thought there was a very remote possibility that if Shabana Mahmood should be made Chancellor of the Exchequer, which has also been talked about, that Mike Tapp might be one of the people in line to take over her job as Home Secretary. But that was obviously a bit of fanciful thinking. And is this just a reminder, which the Conservatives could have told Labour about, that if you change the leader, you actually create a lot of chaos within Parliament and within ministerial ranks? It's not just a neat change at the top. It's problems the whole way through. Absolutely. I mean, it'll be a real test of Andy Burnham's political skill to see how he handles this. Because I mean, you know, they were warned, you know, the Independent, for example, did say that, you know, getting rid of Keir Starmer is all very well. He's made he's made some terrible mistakes. But the Labour Party needs to bear in mind that there is a cost to changing leader. And we've seen that with the with the Tory party. The Tory party demonstrated that extremely clearly. And yet Labour MPs went ahead and and crashed the car anyway. All right. Well, thank you very much for joining me again. It's always a pleasure to have you on the programme. Using the internet without a VPN, a virtual private network, is a bit like taking to the road without car insurance. All it takes is one unlucky moment to cost you a lot of cash. This video's sponsor is Private Internet Access. They are the VPN to help keep you safe. 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Because, I mean, you know, they were warned, you know, the Independent, for example, did say that, you know, getting rid of Keir Starmer is all very well, he's made some terrible mistakes, but the Labour Party needs to bear in mind that there is a cost to changing leader, and we've seen that with the Tory party. The Tory party demonstrated that extremely clearly, and yet Labour MPs went ahead and crashed the car anyway. All right, well, thank you very much for joining me again, it's always a pleasure to have you on the programme. But I'm now joined by my panel, Robert Corts and Matthew Stadland. Matthew, let me come to you first. This is very undesirable, and all seemed to be going quite smoothly for Labour, that the behaviour of Keir Starmer has actually been very dignified, Andy Burnham seems to be the only candidate, they'd been hoping for problems to evaporate in the hot summer sun. But instead of that, Mike Tapp's really set the cat amongst the pigeons. First of all, let me correct you, if I may, on something that you mischaracterised in your introduction. You said that Labour are basically in favour of open borders. That is simply and demonstrably untrue. It is categorically untrue, and in fact, actually, Mike Tapp is one of those who has been repeatedly making the case that nothing could be further from the truth than that Labour are in favour of open borders. He's been resolute on that. So that's the first thing. Until today, when suddenly he's gone for open borders. No, that's not open borders, that's about treating people who have come here to help this country as social care workers, who have helped people such as my dying father a couple of years ago. He was helped by 20, 30 people sponsored by the NHS, only one of whom was born in this country. They did a fantastic job, almost all of them, and allowed him, along with the help from me and my mum and others, allowed him to die a dignified death. So what I think you've also mischaracterised, actually, is the Shabana Mahmood point. I think she's concerned that Mike Tapp is passing off as his own something that she might have been developing in order to signal to Andy Burnham that she wasn't quite as robust and fierce on reducing immigration than some have characterised her to be. But therefore it's all about manoeuvring around the NHS. And that's sordid. And that's squalid. And I was not in favour, by the way, of this coup, and I find it extraordinary that the orchestrator of this coup, or one of them, Andy Burnham, now appears to be asking for more time from the Prime Minister. That's very odd, isn't it? That if you want to become Prime Minister, surely you want to become Prime Minister now, rather than in a few months' time. But this shows the chaos that changing leader causes, and we were experts in that. It does. I'm afraid that's right, Jacob. But we've seen this only too clearly, really to our cost, that the political dispatching, defenestration of a leader unlocks all sorts of demons which then rattle around and have consequences throughout the rest of the parliamentary party. And you can't necessarily see where those consequences are going to go. And what we've seen here is the real disintegration of any political authority, not just as far as Keir Starmer is concerned. You'd expect that, because he's now a lame duck Prime Minister, but in terms of wider members of the Cabinet as well. And the constitutional question, I mean, secretaries of state cannot fire their junior ministers. Nobody's ever thought that they could. That is a prime ministerial role. In a way, Shabana Mahmood's broken the ministerial code too, hasn't she, by calling for a fellow minister to be sacked? Well, I suspect there's an element of journalistic phrasing there involved in the reporting that we've seen. I suspect what she's done is gone to the Prime Minister and said, this is unacceptable, which you would expect secretaries of state to do, because her authority has been undermined as well as the Prime Minister's. But yes, constitutionally, that's absolutely right. But if I may, just on one other thing, I've got to just defend you, Jacob, and just take on the point that Matthew made about the open borders thing, because I do think this shows how fundamentally unsound Labour are on immigration. Because what they're doing is taking credit for all the measures that were taken by the last government. It's on things like dependents and visas and so forth. And it's that that's responsible for the fall in numbers, that and the fact that so many people are leaving. And what we're seeing here from Mike Tapp is someone who unquestionably has broken the ministerial code. Yes, you can't free wheel on policy in the way that he's done, but you're all seeing that inclination towards a party that fundamentally does believe in very high levels of... Sorry. There are two Tories in the room, right? And I've just got to hold you to account on this, if I may, in a counter-strike. And that is that Mike Tapp points out, if his figures are correct, that between 2021 and 2024, which is the period when you guys were in government, correct me if I'm wrong, more than 600,000, 600,000 health and care visas were issued to help fill just 40,000 jobs. Now, it is true that net migration has come crashing down under this government, partly, I think, because of James Cleverley's reforms, but that is an astonishing figure. And what really matters here, by the way, the politics is interesting. If you look at this YouGov poll today, Andy Burnham absolutely annihilates Nigel Farage, 43% to 23%. It is far closer between Andy Burnham and your leader. It's 32% to Burnham and 28% to Kemi Badesnot, which I think is really interesting. I think we have not just reached peak reform. I think reform in major crisis, maybe we'll come to that later. But the policy here is fascinating, because Mike Tapp himself doesn't quite seem to know which side he's on. On the one hand, he's worried, quite legitimately, about people who came here as social care workers to help us, with legitimate expectations about a timetable when they might be able to get indefinite leave to remain. Now they're facing a doubling of that. He seems to want to make an exemption for social care workers, but at the same time, he as a bloke is pointing out that you guys gave 600,000 visas just for 40,000 spots. But doesn't that show a broken system, and therefore lots of people must have come in fraudulently? 600,000 visas for 40,000 spots, a lot of them must have been claiming or moving as soon as they got here. But the policy that was changed, it was changed by the last government. That's why the action was taken against those figures. That's why the numbers are dropping. It's nothing to do with anything this government's done. But it was your policy originally, guys, wasn't it? Let's face it, come on. You know, in policy, there's all sorts of reasons why the immigration figures increased to things like the Hong Kong nationals, there's a Ukraine scheme, there's all sorts of reasons by that. But the action was taken by the last government, which this government claims is getting the benefit from. It often happens that way. Gordon Brown used to claim years of economic growth, which was all down to Ken Clarke and Norman Wand. Anyway.