Corbyn’s focus set to shift to leave seats after poll
Jeremy Corbyn has sought to play down reports that Labour is going to switch to fighting a more defensive campaign, putting more stress on policies that might appeal to leave voters. News of the change of tack emerged after the publication of the most-eagerly awaited poll of the campaign, a YouGov MRP analysis that suggests Boris Johnson is on course for a majority of 68. Speaking at an event in Southhampton, where he published Labour’s environment manifesto, A Plan for Nature, Corbyn dismissed suggestions that this meant he would now have one message for leave voters, and another for remain voters. He told reporters:
Our campaign is in every part of the country. I am travelling all around the country. I say the same thing at every place I go. I don’t have one message for one group. I say the same message everywhere. Vote Labour in order to get a government that will deal with the inequalities and poverty and injustice austerity has heaped on this country.
But the Guardian has been told that Labour is planning to change its approach, and having pursued a relatively offensive strategy (focusing on Tory-held seats), it now plans to concentrate more on shoring up the Labour vote in constituencies the party already holds. There have been reports saying that the party’s private polling shows it is vulnerable in leave seats but – as ever – private polling mostly replicates the results of polling that gets released to the public, and the YouGov survey highlighted this exact point. Here is an extract form the write-up from YouGov’s Anthony Wells:
If the election were held today we project that the Tories would win 359 seats (a gain of 42 from 2017), Labour would win 211 (down by 51), the SNP 43 (up eight) and the Liberal Democrats 13 (a gain of one). Plaid Cymru would retain their four seats, the Greens would keep their single seat, and the Brexit party would not take any seats at all.
As it stands, the swing to the Conservative party is bigger in areas that voted to leave in 2016, with the bulk of the projected Tory gains coming in the north and the urban West Midlands, as well as former mining seats in the East Midlands.
At this point in the campaign, the Liberal Democrats have not made any real breakthrough – with our current projections showing that while they would pick up four seats they would lose three elsewhere.
The survey has acquired near-gospel status in the Westminster political system because in 2017 the YouGov MRP (multilevel regression and post-stratification) model (explained here, if you are interested) was about the one polling exercise that predicted a hung parliament. Perhaps this one will turn out to be accurate too, but there is no guarantee of that, and of course the campaign has another fortnight to run.
Meanwhile
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has attacked the spending plans of the UK’s two main parties, saying neither election manifesto “is a properly credible prospectus”. As my colleague Larry Elliott explains in his analysis of the IFS verdict, its judgment was “brutal and even-handed: a plague on both your houses”. There is a summary of what it said about the Tories’ plans here, Labour’s here and the Lib Dems’ here.
Jo Swinson, the Lib Dem leader, has sought to put Boris Johnson’s character flaws at the heart of the election campaign by using a speech to argue that he is “not fit to be prime minister” because he is selfish, dishonest and divisive.
Jeremy Corbyn, Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister and SNP leader, Jo Swinson, the Lib Dem leader, Adam Price, the Plaid Cymru leader and Sîan Berry, the Green co-leader, have been preparing for a Channel 4 News debate on the environment starting at 7pm. Boris Johnson has refused an invitation to appear, and reportedly Channel 4 is planning to replace him with an ice sculpture that should melt under the glare of the studio lights. There will be full coverage on our live blog.
Conservative candidates in the general election have been issued with a detailed 17-page dossier on how to attack Labour and Liberal Democrat rivals which contains numerous rehashed and potentially misleading claims, the Guardian can reveal. You can read the full dossier embedded in our story here.
Medics have called for guarantees that health will not be put at risk for profit after Labour released official documents that it said proved the NHS would be “on the table” in trade talks with the US.
Labour has deselected its candidate for Falkirk over alleged antisemitic posts on Facebook, leaving the party unable to contest a seat it once held for decades.
An academic whose research was championed by the prime minister’s key adviser Dominic Cummings has revealed he voted remain in the EU referendum and has hit out at the Conservatives’ Brexit plans.
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