When Labour leader Keir Starmer asked the prime minister merely to lift the NHS surcharge on migrant NHS workers and carers but didn’t call for the abolition of the surcharge on all migrant workers, he was criticised, particularly by Labour Party members (including myself). When Sienna Rodgers, writing in Labour List, suggested that “The party hasn’t retreated policy-wise, it’s just that the new Labour leader reckons he should only pick fights that he has a chance of winning”, I posted: “Sorry, but he’s not going to win it anyway (remember that 80-seat majority).”

I was wrong. He won, not in a vote against an 80-seat majority, but because the resistance to Johnson’s plan encompassed not just the opposition parties in parliament but also a number of Tory MPs, as well as hosts of people outside parliament, including health-care workers, many of whom took to the airwaves and social media in protest. None of them could stomach the cynicism and callousness of Johnson’s response to Starmer’s question. Even Johnson, who has survived many embarrassments and many a scandal in his career, might not have survived the shame of this one. So within hours the U-turn began. There will now be no surcharge on NHS workers, including health workers, porters and cleaners, as well as independent health workers and social care workers.

So – well done Keir.

But Starmer also said later that he was in favour of abolishing the surcharge altogether (or his spokesperson did). So why didn’t his amendment to the Immigration and Social Security Bill say that? And why didn’t he say that at PMQs? Johnson would surely still have performed his U-turn on the health workers’ surcharge, given the widespread opposition to it that emerged everywhere, much of which he provoked by his statement (which turned out not to be true) that abolishing the surcharge for health workers would cost £900m.[1] So I still have to ask the question I asked in my original post: Why not go the whole hog, if he believes in it, and say “scrap the charge altogether”? And I go back to my original post: “Possible answer: he’s scared of the headlines that will say ‘Labour wants to flood Britain with migrants’.” But if that’s the reason, he has simply put off the evil day. If at the next general election the scrapping of the whole surcharge system goes into the Labour manifesto, he will have to face those headlines then and fight furiously against them. If it isn’t in the manifesto, he will have capitulated.

[1] “Figures from the House of Commons Library showed that £917m was raised over four years from all migrants paying the surcharge. The library estimated it would cost about £35m a year to exempt all NHS staff, and more for care workers.” (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/21/johnson-forced-to-drop-nhs-surcharge-for-migrant-health-workers)