Elphicke’s defection is an utter farce

It’s always the activists I feel sorry for when someone crosses the floor. There you are in the Dover constituency Labour Party, plugging away in a seat your party held until 2010 and which, given the state of the polls, you might have a chance of picking up at the general election. And then one statement from Natalie Elphicke and, all of a sudden, you’re pounding the pavement alongside the very Tory against whom you’ve been campaigning so hard for four years. It’s a rum deal, even if they are reportedly planning to stand down at the next election.

That this latest defection, timed just ahead of PMQs, will further undermine Rishi Sunak is obvious, although the would-be rebellion against his leadership still shows no sign of going anywhere. But analysed on its own terms, Elphicke’s decision seems to owe more to magical thinking than to strategy.

Is it really fair, for example, to claim that “the centre ground has been abandoned” on the Prime Minister’s watch? The Safety of Rwanda Act has put progressive backs up, certainly. But beyond that, there is precious little of the radical right (or any radicalism of any flavour) in Sunak’s technocratic policy offer.

And while it’s perfectly reasonable to be angry at the Government for “failing to keep our borders safe and secure”, it’s quite a leap to join Labour on that basis – as Elphicke herself knew just a year ago, when she warned that the party was out to “defy” the British people in their attempts to bring immigration under control, and said Labour backed “fewer and weaker border controls”.

The Opposition has yet to present a clear and workable proposal for clearing the asylum backlog that doesn’t implicitly involve waving a lot of people through. As for stopping the boats, well: the easiest way to do that is to stop searching the lorries. It might treat the symptom, but that isn’t the same thing as border control.

Elphicke also goes heavy on housing, and says she is “honoured to have been asked to work with Keir and the team to help deliver the homes we need”. Perhaps that’s a good fit; she has previously written for ConservativeHome in support of rent freezes, and said that the only good types of occupancy are owner-occupation and social housing – not the “private renting experiment”.

Now I’m a fanatic on housing. But it’s important to note that none of these proposals address the fundamental need to actually build millions of houses. It’s all more state-assisted borrowing, which will only inflate prices further, with state tenantry as the increasingly-necessary alternative.

It has always been an open question whether Labour will actually live up to its big talk on the housing crisis. If Starmer is drafting Tory Nimby’s to work on his policy, that isn’t a good sign.