‘Oooh, your statement was so much more partisan than mine!’ Iain Duncan Smith almost said to Stephen Timms this afternoon as the pair sparred over Bulgarian and Romanian migrants. The Work and Pensions Secretary was answering an urgent question from Labour’s Frank Field on the government’s readiness for the end of transitional controls. The debate veered towards the two men accusing the other of making party political points on this issue, but it also offered those in the House of Commons a number of useful opportunities.
The first was an opportunity for the Secretary of State to indulge in just a little bit of Labour-bashing. He pointed out that the previous government’s estimates of the number of migrants who would appear in this country in the last wave turned out to be humiliatingly wrong. ‘I understand the frontbench opposite now admits that they fundamentally got it wrong on immigration, but the scope to which they got it wrong is really why we have this issue,’ he told MPs, adding that the problem was ‘far bigger than anything they ever wanted to tell the public’.
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