Prime minister faces claim Tories are ‘stealing the candlesticks’ on the way out of government
After a passage in his speech attack Labour on familiar grounds, Rishi Sunak also hit out at Reform UK.
[Reform UK] are not on the side of who you think they are.
Reform are standing candidates here in Scotland that are pro independence and anti monarchy.
Continue reading...Author responds after shadow chancellor says party would be ‘really happy’ to ‘give her assurances’
JK Rowling has agreed to a meeting with Labour after Rachel Reeves said the party would be “really happy” to “give her assurances” over its plans to change the process through which people can legally change gender.
Speaking in Scotland, Reeves said protection for women-only spaces would “absolutely stay”, adding: “We’re not going to be changing anything around biological sex … We’re really happy to talk to JK Rowling to give her assurances about that.”
Continue reading...Shadow foreign secretary repeats belief in ‘rules-based order’ and also says UK would not seek EU membership
David Lammy has reiterated that Labour would seek to implement an arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu if one was issued by the international criminal court.
Speaking to CNN, the shadow foreign secretary said a Labour government would comply if an order was issued for the arrest of the Israeli prime minister, adding that he expected the response to be the same all over Europe.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Party has pledged to abolish House of Lords but plans initial appointments to bolster its benches
Labour is to appoint dozens of peers within weeks in an attempt to push through its policies and improve the representation of women in the House of Lords, the Guardian has learned.
Senior Labour figures have drawn up a list of peerages to bolster the party benches and help implement its legislative programme if it wins the election on 4 July. The Conservatives have 104 more peers than Labour, while fewer than a third of the 784 members of parliament’s second chamber are women.
Continue reading...Party’s deputy leader says Fair Work Agency will have the power to inspect workplaces and levy fines
Labour will create a watchdog with “real teeth” that has the power to prosecute and fine companies that breach the rights of their employees as part of its plans to strengthen workers’ rights.
Angela Rayner, the party’s deputy leader, told the Observer that she would create a new body, the Fair Work Agency, to oversee her proposals. She said that millions of workers could be losing out on basic rights as a result of underenforcement.
Continue reading...Candidates in key central belt hope to scoop up voters who have become disillusioned with their election rivals
Not for the first time, Blair McDougall, Labour’s candidate in East Renfrewshire on the outskirts of Glasgow, is telling a wavering voter that the election here is “so, so close”.
If predictions of a knife-edge outcome weren’t enough to motivate him, many people – including some in Barrhead, which he is visiting today – have just received their postal ballots. Their votes will be cast in the next few days.
Continue reading...Latest Opinium survey shows gap with Labour widening after another week of Conservative gaffes, while Reform rises two points to 16%
The Tories’ disastrous election campaign has propelled Labour to a near-record poll lead with just 11 days to go until election day.
The latest Opinium poll for the Observer puts Labour on 40% (unchanged compared with a week ago), with the Tories languishing on just 20% (down three on the week).
Continue reading...Labour leader told if elected he will have to rejoin the customs union to meet party’s manifesto pledges, while 56% of voters say Brexit was bad for economy
A Labour government under Keir Starmer will fail to maximise the UK’s economic growth unless it takes the country back into the European Union’s single market and customs union, leading economists and diplomats have said.
The warnings come as an Opinium poll for the Observer finds that 56% of voters now believe Brexit has been bad for the UK economy as a whole, compared with just 12% who believe it has been economically beneficial.
Continue reading...Reform UK leader refuses to apologise after his remarks attracted widespread condemnation
Nigel Farage has doubled down on his claims that the west provoked the Russian invasion of Ukraine, refusing to apologise and insisting he is not an “apologist or supporter of Putin”.
The Reform UK leader had appeared on the BBC’s Panorama programme on Thursday night, drawing a link between Nato and EU expansion in recent decades and the conflict in eastern Europe.
Continue reading...Labour leader says he would refuse to participate in negotiations for another independence referendum if he is elected PM
Speaking of Nigel Farage: the Reform UK leader has praised the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate for being an “important voice” for the emasculated and giving boys “perhaps a bit of confidence at school” in online interviews that appear to be aimed at young men over the past year.
The Guardian’s Rowena Mason and Ben Quinn report:
Continue reading...Those standing in easy or unwinnable constituencies lose access to key party software if deemed not to be canvassing hard enough in twinned target areas
Dozens of Labour candidates have been blocked from accessing the party’s canvassing systems, which help them drum up support from voters, if they are deemed not to be campaigning enough in target seats.
In some cases, candidates who have been campaigning every day in battleground seats they are twinned with – as instructed to by Labour HQ – in parts of the home counties and Essex, have still lost their access to key software as their seats are considered either very safe or simply not winnable.
Continue reading...Prime minister says suspects must face ‘full force of law’ if found guilty; Labour, SNP and Lib Dem leaders speak during programme
The next question comes from Linda, who says Davey’s antics during the election campaigns (fun photo opportunities, often involving him getting wet) haven’t looked prime-ministerial.
Davey says he has been trying to grab attention.
It was very difficult governing with the Conservatives. We couldn’t get everything we wanted …
You either had to stay in and fight inside the government or leave. I think the easy choice for me would be to leave, vote against it, and tour the media studios and complain. The hard choice was to stay in, roll up my sleeves and really fight.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Chris Skidmore, ex-energy minister, says Rishi Sunak’s bid to turn net zero into culture war issue is ‘greatest tragedy of his premiership’
The Conservatives’ former net zero tsar has revealed that he intends to vote Labour for the first time because Rishi Sunak has been “siding with climate deniers” to politicise the energy transition.
Writing exclusively in the Guardian, Chris Skidmore, a former energy minister, said he could not back the Tories, who had argued that net zero was “a burden and not a benefit”, a decision that he said would cost it votes.
Continue reading...PM suggests curbs on finance or driving licences for 18-year-olds who refuse service during challenging Question Time leaders’ special
Rishi Sunak has indicated that young people might face restrictions on access to finance or driving licences if they refuse to do national service, as he faced a TV quizzing from voters.
Asked during a BBC Question Time special what sanctions people could face for declining to take part in the Conservative policy of compulsory national service for all 18-year-olds, the prime minister pointed to “driving licences, or the access to finance, all sorts of other things”.
Continue reading...BBC names candidate as Laura Saunders and says she is married to party’s director of campaigns
In case you missed this late yesterday: Conservatives are projected to slump to their “lowest seat tally in the party’s almost 200-year history” at the General Election, according to the latest YouGov poll.
YouGov said its latest study projects Labour to secure 425 seats, the Tories 108, the Liberal Democrats 67, SNP 20, Reform UK five, Plaid Cymru four and the Green Party two. It noted such a scenario would hand Keir Starmer a 200-seat majority while it added Reform UK leader Nigel Farage is “likely” to win in Clacton.
The findings are similar to those from the Guardian’s Ipsos MRP poll on Tuesday, which showed the Conservatives winning just 115 seats, with Labour on 453.
YouGov used a technique known as multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP) to model the outcome of the election in every constituency across Britain, PA reports.
It said the estimated seat projections were based on modelled responses from 36,161 adults in England and Wales, and 3,818 in Scotland, between June 11 and 18. Several high-profile Conservatives, including Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, would lose out if the projection played out at the ballot box on 4 July.
YouGov wrote:
Our new MRP has the Conservatives on their lowest seat tally in the party’s almost 200-year history.
Our latest model has 109 seats as toss ups – meaning that the winning party’s lead is less than five points. Sixty five marginal seats are contests between the Conservatives and Labour.”
Continue reading...Sir Anthony Seldon leads analysis that concludes that equality, growth and the UK’s standing in the world have all declined since 2010
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And here are some of the best pictures from yesterday’s campaigning. As more voting people than ever appear poised to turn away from the Tories, Sunak appeared in several photographs with sheep and lobsters as he visited North Devon, held by the Tories since 2015. The Guardian’s Archie bland named the sheep the “Dubious photo opportunity of the day”, after the sheep ran away:
Starmer, meanwhile, appeared on LBC where he clarified that Premier League Football Clubs would not be subject to a 10% transfer tax to fund clubs lower down the pyramid. “Let me just kill it dead, we’re not looking at that,” Starmer said. He also visited a tennis club and a pub in Reading West and mid Berkshire.
Continue reading...Nobel prize winners and former Bank of England officials believe Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer can bring about ‘desperately needed’ change
Labour’s plans for ending Britain’s long-term economic stagnation have been backed by a group of leading economists, including three Nobel prize winners and a former Bank of England deputy governor.
In a boost to the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, the 16 UK and internationally based economists said change was “desperately needed” after the policy mistakes and failures of the past 14 years since the Conservatives took power.
Continue reading...John Caudwell, the Phones4U founder, says he is ‘rather despairing’ about Conservatives after 51 years of support
A Conservative party donor who donated £500,000 to Boris Johnson’s compaign in 2019 has announced he will vote for Labour in next month’s general election.
John Caudwell, who founded the mobile phone retailer Phones4U, made the announcement on Tuesday evening, in comments first reported by the Times and the BBC.
Continue reading...Labour leader asked if he would have served in a Corbyn cabinet and declines to say council tax won’t rise if his party wins
Q: [From Emma in Greenwich] How will you protect single-sex spaces for girls, while making it easier to get a gender recognition certificate?
Starmer says he is passionate about protecting single-sex spaces. As director of public prosecutions, he dealt with a lot of cases involving violence against women and girls.
Continue reading...David Omand says pledges on nuclear deterrent shows party can be trusted ‘to stick to serious defence policy’
Labour’s position on national security has been endorsed by a former head of the UK intelligence agency, GCHQ, who said the party can be trusted to “stick to serious defence policy.”
The backing by Sir David Omand is a boost in a key area for Keir Starmer, who has sought to promote Labour’s security as a way of emphasising how the party has changed since Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
Continue reading...