A moment of enthusiastic but qualified unity in the House of Commons

It is a good advert for democracy that our representatives are able to disagree politely at a time of war, but this was a careful and conditional unity, writes John Rentoul

The Commons was conspicuously and loudly united today, rising to a rare standing ovation for the Ukrainian ambassador (UK Parliament/PA)

Keir Starmer often struggled to strike the right balance between supporting the government and constructive criticism during the pandemic. He has been more successful in striking that balance in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

It helped that the Commons was conspicuously and loudly united today, rising to a rare standing ovation for the Ukrainian ambassador, watching proceedings from a side gallery, as Prime Minister’s Questions got under way.

This gave the Labour leader the chance to declare that “this house and this country stand united in our support for the Ukrainian people against Russian aggression”. He said it well, and only cynics would have been saying to themselves that the Commons wasn’t quite united, because there are a number of MPs who support the Stop the War Coalition, which until very recently argued that the aggressor in Ukraine was Nato. John McDonnell, the Labour MP who was two years ago Starmer’s shadow cabinet colleague, was due to speak at a Stop the War rally at 6.30 tonight.

It must have taken some restraint on Boris Johnson’s part not to mention Labour’s equivocating tendency in his answers, but he also managed better than he often did during the pandemic to strike the right balance between being prime ministerial and being partisan. So he welcomed the opposition’s support unconditionally. “I am glad that the benches opposite are as united as we are that Putin must fail,” he said.

On such a day of unity, though, what could Starmer ask questions about? He could have asked about refugees, but again a cynic might observe that this might be storing up trouble for the future. Public opinion might be hugely supportive of offering sanctuary to fleeing Ukrainians now, but prudence dictates, with an eye to the longer term, that Labour should not get too far ahead of the government. Much better to leave that to the Scottish National Party, whose Westminster leader Ian Blackford, demanded that the government should waive visa requirements for Ukrainians.

After an uncertain start, in which the government doubled its estimate of the number of Ukrainians who might come here from 100,000 to 200,000 overnight between Monday and Tuesday, and today Johnson spoke of “hundreds of thousands”, the prime minister had a fortified position that he was able to defend. He explained to Blackford that the UK policy was generous, but that he would not abandon all checks because of “reasonable security concerns”.

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Indeed, at the end of the session, Johnson took an even more robust swipe against Angela Crawley, another SNP MP who demanded more help for refugees, saying: “She should be proud of what the UK is doing.” He invited her to “look at what we have done, just under my premiership, to help people from Afghanistan; look at what we have done to help the Hong Kong Chinese”.

Starmer chose to ask all his six questions, then, about Roman Abramovich and other rich Russians. It felt, to this particular cynic, both trivial and cautious. The Labour leader knew that the prime minister wouldn’t be able to give much of an answer, as the question of identifying and sanctioning individuals with alleged connections to the Putin regime is swarming with lawyers.

The prime minister didn’t give much of an answer, saying the government was leading the way in the international response. Britain had led calls to exclude Russia from the Swift banking system, he said, and he took personal credit for the Moscow stock exchange falling by $250bn on Thursday, before it closed.

Starmer switched to offering Labour’s support for amendments to the Economic Crime Bill, coming before the Commons on Monday, to “crack open shell companies” to expose the true extent of Russian interests in the UK. If it were as easy as that it would have been done years ago, but it gave Starmer something to demand, and Johnson something to say he would look at.

It is always good to see the House of Commons united, and it is a good advert for democracy that our representatives are able to disagree politely at a time of war, but this was a careful and conditional unity, built on the agreement across nearly all MPs that Vladimir Putin is in the wrong. There are likely to be harder questions ahead about how to bring this conflict to an end.