In areas of weakness, Labour can only complain that the government isn’t tough enough

Much of the coverage of today’s Immigration Bill has centred around those controversial ‘go home’ vans, now ditched because they only sent one person home. Theresa May told the Commons this afternoon that ‘we won’t be rolling out the vans, they were too much of a blunt instrument’. In response to a question from Keith Vaz, she said:

‘What I said to the right honourable gentleman is I didn’t have a flash of blinding light one day and walk into the Home Office and say, I know, why don’t we do this?’ What I have done is looked at the interim evaluation in relation to the vans. There were some results achieved, but I think politicians should be willing to step up to the plate and say when they think that something hasn’t actually been as good an idea, and I think they were too blunt an instrument, but I think that we should also be absolutely clear about what used to happen under the last government.