My colleague, Jessica Elgot, points out that the Conservatives are being attacked over their claim earlier in the day that “Jeremy Corbyn, supported by Nicola Sturgeon and Tim Farron, has already said he will accept any deal handed down by the EU”.
The Liberal Democrats’ foreign affairs spokesman, Tom Brake responded:
This is an absurd claim from an increasingly desperate Conservative party. David Davis and Theresa May want to impose their extreme Brexit agenda on the country no matter how bad it is for jobs, the NHS and our schools. We are offering the people the final say on Brexit, with a chance to reject a bad deal and remain in the EU.
Corbyn has previously said Labour would vote against a that does not measure up, while Sturgeon has said a bad deal would lead to a second Scottish independence referendum.
May insists she is being honest with voters after 'dementia tax' U-turn
At the end of a testing day, Theresa May faced the BBC’s Andrew Neil in the first in a series of interviews with party leaders. Neil repeatedly pressed her on the Tory social care U-turn, specifics on funding for the party’s manifesto pledges and on honesty in politics.
In the combative interview, May:
- Insisted there had been no U-turn because the principle of the policy remained the same, despite a cap on social care costs having originally been rejected in the manifesto.
- Accused Jeremy Corbyn of “scaremongering” over the policy, while insisting that he had not influenced her decision to perform the U-turn.
- Said she was being honest with the electorate when confronted with quotes from a cabinet colleague that appeared to contradict her position that the manifesto had not changed.
- Confirmed that an extra £8bn the Tories have promised to spend on the NHS will not be new money.
- Declined to say how many people would lose their winter fuel allowance if she was reelected, saying it would only be decided in consultation after the election.
- Said she could be trusted to keep her manifesto promises after Neil listed several key policies she had failed to deliver on.
- Insisted her cabinet colleagues supported her pledge to cut immigration levels, despite claims to the contrary from the former chancellor, George Osborne.
- Refused, once again, to rule out rises in income tax and national insurance, saying only in general terms that the Tories wanted low taxes.
Updated
Neil closes by asking how long May intends to remain in No 10. She will only say that she is concentrating on this election and the next parliament. Beyond that, she will not be drawn.
Updated
Neil raises George Osborne’s claim that no cabinet members support the immigration target May has pledged. She denies it, saying “it’s me and my team” that want to control immigration.
Next up: Neil points out that May has failed since entering office to keep her promise on getting net migration figures down. He asks: how can people trust her? May insists her party wants to get it down, while Labour does not.
Neil tries again, asking whether or not May thinks that restating a promise she has repeatedly failed to keep is eroding trust. May says people will need to decide whom they trust: Labour or the Conservatives.
Updated
How many pensioners will lose their winter fuel allowance, asks Neil.
May declines to give a number, saying only that her government will consult on it. “It’s a vague promise, uncosted, you don’t know,” Neil says. May reiterates that they intend to consult. “Wouldn’t you have done that before you came up with it?” Neil shoots back.
Updated
Neil moves on to the “just about managing”. He tells May that, despite her saying she is on the side, things are getting harder for those people. She says she wants a stronger economy with higher paid jobs and lower energy bills.
But Neil persists, telling her that people are being squeezed. “In what way are you on their side?” Again, May tells him that she wants to bring economic prosperity.
Updated
On tax, May says the Tories are a party of low taxes and want to reduce them. But, once again, she avoids the question on whether or not she will she raise taxes, saying only that she wants the tax system to be sustainable.
Neil then asks May about the NHS’s recent troubles. The investment is “too little, too late”, he suggests. May accepts that targets have been missed but says that is not the be all and end all in the health service.
Updated
Planned infrastructure spending of £10bn will be separate and will “come from a variety of sources”, May says.
Updated
Neil asks how they Tories will pay for their promised extra £8bn for the NHS. May talks about the economy and social care. She says the party’s “economic credibility is not in doubt”, while Labour’s is. “Your ability to answer this question may be in doubt,” Neil says.
Pressed to say where the money will come from, May again touts the Tories’ record on the economy, which will “generate the funds”.
Updated
Neil asks May what the cap will be, “now that you’re in favour of it”. May refuses to say, explaining that it will come out of her planned consultation.
Neil asks why was this not in the manifesto. May insists that the idea of a consultation was, though the idea of a cap was rejected. She again presses the line that fake claims have been put about by her opponents, accusing them of “playing politics” with the issue.
Neil gets on to the social care U-turn. “Nothing has changed from the principles,” May insists. She says the social care system will collapse if it is not fixed.
Neil presses her: “You say nothing has changed,” before hitting her with quotes from her own health secretary rejecting the policy the party now proposes. May needs to be honest, Neil suggests. May insists she is being honest and says the party is setting out a plan it believes will fix the problem. She accuses Corbyn of seeking to “sneak into No 10” by playing on people’s fears.
May insists the Tories have “not rewritten” the manifesto because the principles remain the same. The manifesto explicitly rejected a cap on social care costs.
Neil presses her further on the honesty issue. May says all she has done is clarify what the policy is.
Updated
Neil suggests that May thought she could get away with winning with “uncosted and half-baked” policies, which May rejects.
Andrew Neil interviews Theresa May
Andrew Neil’s interview with Theresa May is under way on the BBC now. It is part of a series of interviews with the party leaders.
He opens by asking her about the cut in her poll lead. “There’s only one poll that counts,” May responds: the election itself. She portrays the vote as one about who people want to conduct the Brexit negotiations: her or the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
Updated
The BBC has released some details from Andrew Neil’s interview with Theresa May, which is due to air at 7pm. The prime minister insisted once again that “nothing has changed”, despite the Tories having explicitly rejected the policy that they propose.
She said the cap meant “protecting people for the future”, the BBC reported.
We are providing a system that provides sustainability in our social care for the future and we have got an ageing population. We need to do this otherwise our system will collapse.
We have analysed whether or not May is right to claim that “nothing has changed”.
Critics have accused her of presiding over a “manifesto meltdown” but she has claimed that rival parties have been “trying to scare” elderly people.
Updated
Nicola Sturgeon is widely expected to confirm she still supports a 50p top rate of income tax, but only if it is implemented UK-wide, as she reopens her battle with Labour over the right way to support public spending at the Scottish National party’s manifesto launch on Tuesday.
Kezia Dugdale, the Scottish Labour leader, said at her manifesto launch on Monday that she was justified in calling for higher across-the-board tax rates in Scotland than those proposed by John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, for the rest of the UK. McDonnell has promised no tax rises for those earning less than £80,000.
Dugdale said that since Holyrood has full autonomy to set different rates and bands to the rest of the UK above 10p in the pound, she can raise taxes to fund Scottish priorities.
Her officials said raising the basic rate by 1p to 21p for those earning above £11,500 and the higher rate to 41p for those earning over £42,385 would, alongside a 50p top rate for those earning £150,000 or more in Scotland, raise £690m a year.
With that, Scottish Labour could:
- Increase child benefit by £240 a year by 2020, lifting tens of thousands of children out of poverty.
- Stop cuts to council services, including schools.
- Prevent further public sector job cuts.
But, if Labour wins the general election, Dugdale will face claims from her rivals that her tax increases are unnecessary, since Jeremy Corbyn’s plans to boost spending by £41bn UK-wide will mean Scottish parliament funding will rise by £3bn by 2022.
Angus Robertson, the SNP’s deputy leader, said after Dugdale’s manifesto launch:
Labour cannot pretend to support ordinary workers when, at the same time, they want to hit them with a fresh tax bombshell – something even the UK Labour party have avoided. As always on tax, on Trident and on Brexit, Labour are at sixes and sevens.
Updated
Andrew Neil has been interviewing Theresa May for a programme going out on the BBC at 7pm. He is being interviewed about his interview now.
Theresa May is first up tonight in Andrew Neil's week of leaders' #GE2017 interviews https://t.co/L9HspVBmgU #BBCElection pic.twitter.com/r7UoGt5jOg
— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) May 22, 2017
He says they recorded the interview at 4.30pm. They recorded 27 minutes. It was recorded “as live”, meaning it will go out as it was recorded.
It was a wide-ranging interview, he says.
He says that, whatever he asked, May usually said that she knew how to run the economy and handle Brexit.
He says the campaign is not going the way May expected. She is “more on the defensive than she expected to to be”.
Q: Was she rattled?
Neil says she was on the defensive.
He says May insisted that she had not changed her position, even though he put it to her what Jeremy Hunt said about this last week. Most commentators will conclude that there has been a change.
He says May would not rule out taxes going up.
Q: How are you approaching these interviews?
Very much with a BBC1 prime-time audience in mind. He is trying not to be too technical and to break out of ‘Westminster bubble’ thinking.
That’s all from me for today.
My colleague Kevin Rawlinson is now taking over the blog.
Updated
The row over Tory plans for social care which unfolded in a quiet north Wales village has been an unexpected boost to Labour on the doorstep, according to the constituency’s MP Ian Lucas, who is defending the seat where Theresa May was forced to say that care costs would be capped.
The Wrexham MP, who is battling to keep his seat with a wafer-thin majority over the Tories, said it was palpable how the chaos over elderly care had resonated with voters.
When the Guardian joined him campaigning in Brynffynnon, central Wrexham, a few hours after the prime minister’s speech, several voters said they had changed their mind about who to vote for over the past week.
Lucas said the party now, perhaps unexpectedly, had a doorstep-ready message for pensioners who had deserted the party in 2015. He said:
We lost a lot of elderly voters in 2015, we did really badly with pensioners. And with the way the Tories have treated these voters now, it has given us a lot of help in dealing with those concerns. We can talk to them about it, and we can say, we’re keeping the triple lock, winter fuel allowance. It’s a very simple message, stick with us and we’ll fight for those things. And we didn’t have that to say in 2015.
In Wales, the so-called dementia tax would not apply because the issue is devolved to the Welsh assembly, though means-testing of winter fuel allowance would come into force. But Lucas said the row over social care funding still had cut through in places such as Wrexham because it seemed at odds with the principles of the NHS.
Whether you’re a millionaire or not, you get care. People buy into the NHS and support it because of that – that’s why this feels so wrong. My mother had dementia, she died during the last general election, I’ve been through the mill with it myself.
Lucas, an MP for 16 years, admitted Labour’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was a topic on the doorstep, generally coupled with concerns about his record on defence.
When voters are worried, Lucas uses a tactic that many independent-minded MPs have used on the doorstep. “I’ve seen five Labour leaders and five Tory leaders, they come and go, you’re voting for the person who is representing you,” he said. “I’m the best person to stand up for Wrexham.
“We need a strong opposition, just look at what’s happened in just three days when she’s put under pressure.”
Updated
A social care U-turn reading list
Here are three blogs about the Theresa May U-turn that are worth reading.
The potential problems are of two types. If May wins this election, which she is still overwhelmingly likely to do, her backbenchers will now fancy their chances of seeing her off on anything they don’t like. If you can get her to back off on self-employed tax or social care, they will reason, why not school dinner cuts, local authority funding or maybe even grammar schools? Governing is a lot more difficult when that is the mood.
Secondly, there is the wider insidious damage of coming to be seen as a wobbler. Margaret Thatcher had a brief cluster of bad polls in the 1987 campaign, and her close ally Lord Young was soon shouting at Norman Tebbit that “we’re losing this fucking election.” Whatever happened in private, however, the lady herself was never seen to panic and went on to clean up on election day.
In 1997, likewise, faint Labour hearts began fluttering when one ICM poll showed the party’s lead being squeezed down to three points; Tony Blair was always beset with anxiety about his advantage slipping away, but he never let himself look worried to the electorate, and his projection of confidence was rewarded with a landslide.
May could very well still win one as well. But she has let the country catch a glimpse of the whites of her eyes. She might yet live to regret it.
Amongst other things it shows the perils of entrusting the manifesto to one man. Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s joint chief of staff, has been working with Cabinet minister Ben Gummer and some others on the manifesto, but there is no question who is pre-eminent and no question whose brainchild this now ditched policy was. Nick Timothy even inserted a swipe (p65) at “the Dilnot Report, which mostly benefited a small number of wealthier people.” The Tories are now picking up Sir Andrew Dilnot’s idea of a cap on individuals’ exposure to care costs.
Civil servants will say this is a reflection of the sort of problems encountered in Whitehall, where Mr Timothy (and his fellow joint chief of staff, Fiona Hill) want everything signed off by them before it meets the eyes of Mrs May. Plenty of officials worry that raises the prospect of Mrs May not getting their advice unfiltered.
One of May’s great assets as Tory leader has been her connection with the base, their sense that she was one of them. In many ways she is, she joined the party as a teenager and met her husband at a Tory event and still goes out canvassing most weekends. This trust has made them willing to follow her. But the row over social care has for the first time suggested that her values and theirs might not be totally aligned.
Earlier today the Conservatives bought the rights to the top Google search when you type in “dementia tax”. It was a failed attempt to defuse a row over Theresa May’s social care policy.
Before news of the U-turn broke, I asked them for their thinking behind the move, which meant the first thing voters searching on Google saw was a link to a website titled The so-called ‘dementia tax’ – get the real facts. A Conservative spokesman explained:
It is quite right we take steps to tackle the misinformation and fear being spread by Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party.
The term “dementia tax” was being used this morning on the front page of both the Financial Times (see 8.38am) and Daily Mail as well as by Labour.
After a bruising day on the issue, the Conservatives appear to be no longer buying the top slot for the term. It has been snapped up by Labour which has set up a page called The Dementia Tax - Get The Real Facts.
Updated
The Scottish National party has been forced into retreat after election candidates attacked an Edinburgh nurse who told Nicola Sturgeon during a live BBC leaders debate that her low pay forced her to use food banks.
Claire Austin, who works for NHS Lothian, came under intense criticism from SNP supporters on Twitter after she challenged the first minister’s decision to hold nurses’ pay rises at 1% for the last eight years. Austin said she was prepared to go on strike over pay with the Royal College of Nursing, which itself reports nurses around the UK using food banks to supplement low pay. She told Sturgeon: “You have no idea how demoralising it is to work within the NHS.”
"You have no idea how demoralising it is to work within the NHS", says audience nurse at #leadersdebate https://t.co/u5WlVZxgul pic.twitter.com/zkDnDkxbfE
— BBC Scotland News (@BBCScotlandNews) May 21, 2017
Joanna Cherry QC, the SNP candidate defending Edinburgh South West, was forced to delete a tweet wrongly alleging Austin was married to a Tory councillor. Cherry apologised and retweeted Shona Robison, the Scottish government’s health secretary, who said: “Important to hear voices of nurses in #leadersdebate, we are offering to work with unions on pay.”
@clairenursey Sorry I was wrong about twitter rumours. Entirely right that your voice is heard. https://t.co/tr1j98tlJG
— Joanna Cherry QC (@joannaccherry) May 21, 2017
Murdo Fraser, the Scottish Tory MSP sitting alongside Cherry in the BBC debate spin room, alleged the MP had been told to make the Tory councillor claim by Jeane Freeman, the Scottish government welfare minister. “It was a disgraceful episode and Nicola Sturgeon and her party should be thoroughly ashamed,” he said. “This smear operation points to something endemic within the SNP.”
Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories also attacked SNP activists who latched on to Austin’s Facebook pages, which showed her sipping champagne as she celebrated new year in the Plaza hotel in New York, dining at Malmaison in Edinburgh and apparently show her daughter at a fee-paying school.
On the campaign trail on Monday, Sturgeon apologised for the social media attacks on Austin. She said:
The nurse on the debate last night was absolutely entitled to raise the issue that she did and, as I said, she raised an issue that I think is one of the biggest in this campaign, the level and value of real wages, not just in the public sector but in the private sector.
Austin said friends and family had paid for those expenses seen on Facebook, and she was defended by the Poverty Alliance, a voluntary sector organisation that oversees the Scottish government’s living-wage programme. The alliance said it was wrong to make moral judgments about the way people lived, adding:
People move in and out of poverty, very few people remain in poverty throughout their entire lives. Items can also be gifts, bought on finance or with a credit card. It is also important to remember that people on low incomes deserve the same treats we all enjoy.
Updated
The Evening Standard editorials have become a lot more interesting since George Osborne became editor. Here is an extract from today’s.
The current Tory leaders should have been ready to defend their approach. Instead we had a weekend of wobbles that presumably prompted today’s U-turn. The Pensions Secretary Damian Green was unable to answer basic questions in a TV interview about who will lose their fuel payments, and how much extra money will go into social care. Either the Government is prepared to remove these payments from millions of pensioners who are not in poverty, and don’t receive pension credit, and spend their substantial savings on social care; or they chicken out, target the tiny percentage of pensioners who are on higher tax rates, save paltry sums and accept the whole manoeuvre is a gimmick. Certainly, if the savings are to pay for a new care cap, then many pensioners will lose their winter fuel payment. This isn’t for consultation after an election — it’s an issue of honesty before an election.
Equally, Boris Johnson should have spent more time genning up on his own notes rather than trying to steal those of his TV interviewer. When asked about changes to social-care funding, he immediately retreated, saying that while the broad thrust was right, the details might change. It was unfortunate that this weekend, of all weekends, was when he compared other politicians to blancmanges.
Johnson used the blancmange line in an article in the Mail on Sunday in which he said that if Jeremy Corbyn were prime minister, “he would go into the negotiating chamber with all the authority of a smacked blancmange.”
The Tories are not planning to announce a proposed level for the social care cap, my colleague Anushka Asthana reports.
The Conservatives will not set out a proposed level for the social care cap, according to sources.
— Anushka Asthana (@GuardianAnushka) May 22, 2017
Updated
Ed Miliband says May's social care U-turn comments show she's a liar
Ed Miliband, the former Labour leader, says Theresa May is lying about her social care U-turn and that, if she can lie about this, she can lie about other things too.
This isn't just an incompetent non u-turn it's a lie. Nobody mentioned a cap because there wasn't going to be one. #takingpeopleforfools
— Ed Miliband (@Ed_Miliband) May 22, 2017
This is now a character issue as well as a care issue. When PM says "nothing has changed" she is lying. If she lies about this what else?
— Ed Miliband (@Ed_Miliband) May 22, 2017
Northern Ireland secretary James Brokenshire challenged Jeremy Corbyn to condemn the IRA after he failed to do so in specific terms – as opposed to in generalised terms – in an interview with Sky News on Sunday. Brokenshire’s comments were passed on by a reporter from the Sun during the launch of Labour’s arts manifesto in Hull earlier.
Asked whether he condemned the IRA as terrorists, Corbyn said:
I condemn all acts of violence in Northern Ireland wherever they came. I spent the whole of the 1980s representing constituencies with large numbers of Irish people in them. We wanted peace, we wanted justice, we wanted a solution. The first ceasefire helped to bring about those talks which represented all sections of the community of Northern Ireland.
The Labour government of 1997 helped bring in the historic Good Friday agreement, the basis of which was a recognition of the differing cultural histories and values of Northern Ireland. It stood the test of time and it’s still there. We have a devolved administration. We should recognise that that peace was achieved by a lot of bravery both in the unionist and in the nationalist community.
People that walked a very difficult extra mile when they were under pressure from their communities not to do so, both republicans and unionists, walked that extra mile and brought us the Good Friday agreement. I think we should use this election to thank those people who brought about the Good Friday agreement.
We are going to be working with the devolved administration to make sure Brexit doesn’t bring about a barbed wire border between the north and south.
Updated
If you are interested in knowing who first coined the term “dementia tax”, this thread, in response to a Twitter question by the BBC’s Amol Rajan, is interesting. The consensus is that it emerged organically, although the Spectator’s Will Heaven is credited with being the first person to use it in an article.
Updated
Here are some tweets from Prof Matthew Goodwin, the academic and Ukip expert, on the back of today’s Guardian/ICM poll results.
In today's ICM the % of Ukip 2015 voters voting Ukip next month is down to 16%, a record low, while % going Con, 43%, is a record high
— Matthew Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) May 22, 2017
Updated with today's ICM. You can have all the Labour bumps in the world but think long & hard about what this means... pic.twitter.com/Maa7XhVjPM
— Matthew Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) May 22, 2017
Here are those Ukip defections -> Con between June 2016 and today, including Lab @philipjcowley
— Matthew Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) May 22, 2017
Today: 15% going Lab, 16% Ukip, 43% Con pic.twitter.com/AmtRMMNlVy
This may be an early version of what Corbyn waves around on June 9th...
— Matthew Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) May 22, 2017
210 polls, May 9 2015 -> May 19 2017
Source: Prof Harold Clarke pic.twitter.com/cu3sc6ODpw
Support for Labour in Wales has surged while the Conservative momentum has gone into reverse, a new poll suggests.
Earlier polls seemed to indicate the Tories were on course for a historic breakthrough in a traditional Labour heartland.
But the latest YouGov Welsh barometer poll suggests that Labour could be on course to win one more seat in Wales than in 2015 – Gower in south Wales.
The poll asked people how they would vote in the general election. The results are:
Labour: 44% (+9 compared with a poll carried out at the start of the month)
Conservatives: 34% (-7)
Plaid Cymru: 9% (-2)
Liberal Democrats: 6% (-1)
Ukip: 5% (+1)
Others: 3% (+1)
Roger Scully, professor of political science at Cardiff University’s Wales governance centre, said in his blog on the figures:
While Labour have been making some progress in the Britain-wide polls, it is not on the scale of what we see here in Wales – where the party are fully 14 points higher than they were in the first poll of the campaign.
Assuming that the findings in our new Welsh poll are correct, they may have been at least partially influenced by the timing of the poll – the fieldwork for which was conducted in the immediate aftermath of the death of [former Welsh Labour leader] Rhodri Morgan. It is possible that there may have been some short-term sympathy boost for Labour.
While short-term factors may account for some of what we see in this latest barometer poll, it does appear that after the extraordinary success of the Conservative party at the beginning of the election campaign, they are losing some ground to Labour.
At least for the moment, Labour seem to be winning the campaign, if not the election as a whole. That is particularly true in Wales. The recent local elections showed the resilience of the Welsh Labour party.
A party does not dominate the politics of a nation for nearly a century, as Labour have done in Wales, simply by accident. Challenged strongly by the Conservatives in this election, Labour seem to be fighting back strongly.
Updated
At Welsh Labour’s manifesto launch first minister Carwyn Jones has promised a “real partnership” between the government in Cardiff and a Labour Westminster administration.
This feels like a shift in tone - at the start of the general election campaign it was expected that Welsh Labour would try to maintain a distance from Jeremy Corbyn, believing he was a vote-loser in Wales.
The Welsh Labour manifesto carries an image of Corbyn - though he is pictured alone rather than with Jones.
Speaking at the manifesto launch in Delyn, north Wales, Jones said:
Welsh Labour is in power in Wales and we want to establish a real partnership with a UK Labour government.
Our Welsh Labour manifesto is what we can do together – with your support. It builds on the vital commitments already announced by Jeremy Corbyn and his team.
By working together with the UK party, we’ve brought forward proposals that will make Wales a fairer, more prosperous country – with power closer to the people.
He said that after years of Tory cuts, an estimated £1.5bn extra would come to Wales every year through UK Labour spending plans.
But Jones also made it clear there was a need for a separate Welsh Labour. He said the party in Wales had become a “real, campaigning, fire-breathing entity” thanks largely to the guidance of the late former first minister Rhodri Morgan, who died last week.
You can read the manifesto here.
Here’s some key commitments from it. It’s striking how many of the headline grabbers relate to north Wales, where the Tories hope to make gains.
The party has promised “big projects” to get the economy moving including:
- Helping deliver the planned £14bn Wyfla Newydd nuclear power station on Anglesey
- Backing the tidal lagoon project in Swansea.
- Securing rail electrification for north Wales
- A metro system for south and north-east Wales and M4 relief road in south Wales.
- Backing a third crossing over the Menai Strait to support the economy of Anglesey and north west Wales.
The manifesto says it will work to abolish the Severn Bridge tolls and promises a new development bank of Wales – in the north.
On higher education it says education should be free and – if funding allowed – there should be no tuition fees. When a Labour government is elected in Westminster, it says it will look again at the issue.
The manifesto also says it is working towards getting one million people speaking Welsh.
Updated
Dilnot says new cap on social care costs should not be much more than £72,000
Sir Andrew Dilnot, who chaired the commission that first produced plans for a cap on the amount people should have to pay for social care, has welcomed Theresa May’s U-turn. This is what he said in an interview with Sky News.
- Dilnot welcomed the Conservative U-turn, saying it would provide “a great deal of reassurance to people”.
- He urged the government not to set the cap much higher than at the £72,000 planned by the David Cameron government. Originally his commission proposed that the level should be set between £25,000 and £50,000 (in 2010 prices), which would be equivalent to a maximum of £65,000 today.
A figure around that would seem reasonable. So I do hope that when the amount is fixed it is not set at a significantly higher level than the £72,000 that was put into legislation by the last government and was in the last Conservative manifesto.
- He said the government could afford to set the cap at around £70,000.
It is certainly the case that doing things in this case space has a significant cost. But the cost shouldn’t be exaggerated. The cost of a cap at that sort of level, £72,000, would be about £2bn a year, compared to total public spending of more than £700bn.
Dilnot said that winter fuel payments, which the Tories were planning to means test, cost £2.1bn a year. And he said that the Tory plan to take into account the value of someone’s house, as well as their assets, when care delivered at home is being means tested would also save the government money.
So, overall this should be certainly manageable. And it is a sign of what kind of society we want to be. If we want to be a good and caring society, then looking after people in this particular form of extremity seems like an obvious thing.
- He said there was a principled case for a cap.
It is a perfectly reasonable argument to say we should have higher levels of inheritance tax, if there are people who think that inheritance tax, particularly for people with large houses, should be higher. That’s a perfectly reasonable position. What does not seem to be a reasonable position is that we should have an inheritance tax that’s much higher if you happen to be one of the one people in 10 who’s unlucky enough to have dementia.
Updated
Tories in the Theresa May camp are hitting back at George Osborne over the Evening Standard’s splash headline (see 2.38pm), according to HuffPost’s Paul Waugh.
Here's the pushback against @George_Osborne. Senior Tory source on the Evening Standard front page on social care U-turn: pic.twitter.com/nQhuVP18la
— Paul Waugh (@paulwaugh) May 22, 2017
Chris Giles, the FT’s economics editor, has produced a graph that seeks to explain how someone spending £150,000 on care would be affected by the various Tory plans. He explains the figures in the tweets below.
And I've just realised (Excel grrrr) my first chart actually assumed £100,000 not £150k costs - here is the real £150k one pic.twitter.com/gt137V2xfF
— Chris Giles (@ChrisGiles_) May 22, 2017
The green section is the current system. It shows that people can lose up to 90% of assets if they have £150,000 care costs
— Chris Giles (@ChrisGiles_) May 22, 2017
The Dilnot proposals is the black line. Takes away those high tax rates for medium asset levels - doesn't help rich much as they are rich
— Chris Giles (@ChrisGiles_) May 22, 2017
Theresa May's first attempt (red) is more generous to those on lower assets (the £100,000 floor) and a little less generous to the rich
— Chris Giles (@ChrisGiles_) May 22, 2017
But note the difference in progressivity is minor. Is this a price worth paying for an inability to soicalise catastrophic risk?
— Chris Giles (@ChrisGiles_) May 22, 2017
May's 2nd version (purple) is assumed here to be same as Dilnot (cap) with more generous means test (floor) - most expensive to exchequer
— Chris Giles (@ChrisGiles_) May 22, 2017
Corbyn says there are 1 million people in the country who need social care.
He says he does not want to follow the Conservatives and start setting one generation against another.
He is not blaming the old, he says. They have made a fantastic contribution.
But he says it is also true that it is not the fault of the young that public services are under pressure and that the government’s finances are in deficit.
Updated
Jeremy Corbyn is speaking in Scarborough. He says this is the 52nd event that he has done, and he says all the time the crowds he is attracting are getting bigger and bigger.
Updated
Here is the headline George Osborne selected for the first edition of the Evening Standard.
Our front page exclusive @EveningStandard on social care u-turn + @Arsenal isn't for sale & Charles Powell on risks of big Tory majority pic.twitter.com/wQwf290hzp
— George Osborne (@George_Osborne) May 22, 2017
His second edition splash headline is considerably sharper. (Good job Theresa May claims she hardly ever reads it - see 10.34am.)
And here's our second edition - following up reaction to the social care U-turn we announced @EveningStandard .... pic.twitter.com/NBt92tY3jQ
— George Osborne (@George_Osborne) May 22, 2017
Updated
There is no one alive who knows more about British elections than Sir David Butler, who has just joined Twitter, despite being in his 90s. He says today’s U-turn is unprecedented.
In the 20 general election campaigns I've followed, I can't remember a U-turn on this scale - or much that could be called a U-turn at all.
— Sir David Butler (@SirDavidButler) May 22, 2017
Updated
Several local Conservative activists who attended the Welsh Conservative manifesto launch at the memorial hall in the village of Gresford told reporters afterwards that they were pleased to see the robust questioning of the prime minister on social care.
One local activist, who did not want to be named, said he thought the policy was imbalanced. “I’ve had family die of dementia and of cancer. I’ve also worked all my life to pass on what I’ve worked for to my children. I’d be devastated if it all had to go on care after I die, but this way it’s a lottery,” he said. “It does seem like the balance isn’t quite right.”
Updated
The Scottish Labour party has predicted that Holyrood would be at least £3bn better off if Jeremy Corbyn boosted public spending after the general election.
Kezia Dugdale, the party’s Scottish leader, said electing a Corbyn government would lead to a transformation and “massive investment” in public services as she launched Labour’s Scottish manifesto in Edinburgh.
Party officials handed out a detailed breakdown of Corbyn’s manifesto pledges to spend at least £42bn, chiefly on policies for England and Wales such as abolishing tuition fees, scrapping the public sector pay cap and expanding free childcare.
They said that under the Treasury’s spending formula developed by Lord Barnett, that would see £3.1bn in so-called “Barnett consequentials” flow to the Scottish parliament over the lifetime of the next UK government.
In an explicit endorsement of Corbyn’s spending pledges, Dugdale appealed to Scottish National party voters to back Labour’s plan for what she said would be a fairer, more equal country.
Dugdale publicly opposed Corbyn’s leadership bids, and mentioned him by name once in her 2,500 word speech, but she described the party’s manifesto as “bold, ambitious and radical [in] the finest traditions of the Labour movement”.
Updated
We’ve got a new, daily election podcast. Here is today’s, featuring Jonathan Freedland, Owen Jones and Zoe Williams.
Guardian/ICM poll shows Tory lead over Labour down to 14 points
Four polls come out at the weekend, and they all showed the Conservative lead over Labour narrowing after the publication of the manifesto. The figures were widely seen as evidence that the Tory social care plans had backfired (presumably by Theresa May too, given her announcement today.)
We’ve now got the results of this week’s Guardian/ICM survey, and it also shows Labour making advances. Here are the figures.
Conservatives: 47% (down 1 from Guardian/ICM last week)
Labour: 33% (up 5)
Lib Dems: 9% (down 1)
Ukip: 4% (down 2)
Greens: 2% (down 1)
Conservative lead: 14 points (down 6)
Martin Boon, ICM’s director, says these figures support claims Labour won the manifesto battle. Here is his take on the figures:
After the delivery of the party manifestos, polling over the weekend has indicated a resurgent, if still rather distant Labour party. ICM has been the stickiest pollster for the Tories, and while we probably still are, our poll today reinforces the impression that Labour have won the short-term manifesto battle. They rise to 33%, up five points on last week, while the Tories drop a point to stand on (a still heady) 47%.
The Tories have had a flat out bad weekend, and the wind does feel as if it’s suddenly blowing in a different direction, but we’ve seen short-term effects like this before, and we’ve seen them dissipate. This is still a massive 14-point Tory lead, and still their election to throw away.
It is almost a whole year since ICM last saw Labour on 33% (June 2016), so it’s a surge that has been a long time coming. However, it does not arise in conjunction with a precipitous Tory collapse, and their 47% remains a number that the party will be wholly delighted with. Electoral Calculus predict an overall majority of 134, with the Tories only just shy of 400 seats. Labour do recover to 177, largely because their polling in their own marginal seats is much improved: a deficit of only three points compared to 17-20 points that we have seen in such places on ICM’s recent polls. It’s a step in the right direction.
Ukip drop to 4%, the lowest online share we have ever allocated to the party. This is partly the result of a methodology change. ICM is able to systematically allocate every respondent to their political constituency via their full postcode, so this week we built into the interview software constituency-level information that precluded Ukip as a party to vote for in those seats where they are not standing a candidate (thus forcing people living in such places to make an alternative choice). We believe this is a good addition to our polling methods; it will explain part of the further Ukip drop but perhaps not all of it.
ICM interviewed 2,004 adults aged 18+ online, on 19-21 May 2017. Interviews were conducted across the country and the results have been weighted to the profile of all adults. ICM is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its rules.
UPDATE: Here are the tables for the poll (pdf).
Updated
According to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, the Tories are now claiming they never ruled out a cap on social care costs - only the Dilnot version of the cap.
Ministers now saying they were only talking about Dilnot's cap when they rejected it
— Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak) May 22, 2017
Claiming manifesto didn't rule out a cap in principle - altho the idea was certainly not in there
— Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak) May 22, 2017
At the last election the Tories promised to implement the recommendation from the Dilnot commission for a cap on social care costs (although at a level much higher than that originally proposed by Andrew Dilnot). But after the election David Cameron’s government said implementation would be delayed until 2020. Last week’s manifesto implied that the Dilnot plans were dead, but today’s announcement suggests they may get a new lease of life.
In its manifesto Labour proposed increasing the social care budget by £8bn over the course of the next parliament.
The manifesto also says Labour would impose a cap on the maximum amount people have to pay for their care, as well as raising the “floor”, the sum people are allowed to keep when all their assets have been used up. Today’s announcement means that the Tories have now on these issues effectively adopted Labour policy.
Labour said their plans would cost £3bn a year. The Tories have not costed their version.
This is from the Labour manifesto.
In its first years, our service will require an additional £3bn of public funds every year, enough to place a maximum limit on lifetime personal contributions to care costs, raise the asset threshold below which people are entitled to state support, and provide free end of life care. There are different ways the necessary monies can be raised. We will seek consensus on a cross-party basis about how it should be funded, with options including wealth taxes, an employer care contribution or a new social care levy.
This is what Jeremy Corbyn said about the Tory U-turn at the Labour event in Hull.
A Tory U-turn on social care would be extremely welcome because I want this country to face up to its responsibilities to those who need care, either frail elderly, those with special needs, those with severe disabilities, those with learning difficulties.
And our proposals are that we will refund social care, putting emergency money into it, so that a million people waiting for social care don’t wait. And we won’t get involved in this horrible policy that the Tories have put forward which will actually damage families and family income, damage people, break up relationships, all kinds of horrible things will happen from this very dangerously ill-thought out social care policy.
And if George Osborne is at last doing something useful in his life of supporting proper funding for social care, then thank you George for that. And I urge him to read very carefully [what] our manifesto says on social care.
Corbyn also said a “dementia tax” would be “horrible”.
Updated
Labour says social care U-turn illustrates 'weak and unstable leadership'
Here is Andrew Gwynne, Labour’s election coordinator, on the Tory U-turn.
Theresa May has thrown her own election campaign into chaos and confusion. She is unable to stick to her own manifesto for more than four days. And by failing to put a figure for a cap on social care costs, she has only added to the uncertainty for millions of older people and their families.
This is weak and unstable leadership. You can’t trust the Tories - if this is how they handle their own manifesto, how will they cope with the Brexit negotiations?
Oh dear. Last week Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, said explicitly that the Tories were dropping plans for a cap on the social care costs that people would have to pay.
Oh dear. Seems Hunt told #r4todag last week manifesto was dropping cap - "not only are we dropping it but we’re being completely explicit."
— Jessica Elgot (@jessicaelgot) May 22, 2017
Here's the full exchange between Jeremy Hunt and @bbcnickrobinson where he said Tory manifesto would drop social care costs cap pic.twitter.com/X2GOrzymyN
— Jessica Elgot (@jessicaelgot) May 22, 2017
What May's social care U-turn means for the election – snap analysis
No one can say anymore that this election is boring. This was a remarkable announcement, because there is no precedent in recent years for a party having to rewrite a major manifesto so completely and so quickly during an election campaign.
The best that can be said for May’s move is that, if you are going to have to perform a policy U-turn, it is best to get it over and done with quickly. A day’s embarrassment is well worth putting up with if it results in policy on a major issue ending up in a place where it is defensible and not haemorrhaging votes, which is what the social care policy seemed to be doing. The Tories abandoned one of the biggest items in their budget earlier this year (the increase in national insurance for the self-employed) and, although that led to dire headlines on the day, it did not destroy the Conservative lead over Labour on the issue of economic competence.
It is also worth remembering that dramatic campaign moments (e.g. Gordon Brown and Gillian Duffy) often have less impact on an election result than observers assume at the time.
That said, it has been an awful morning for May - possibly her worst as prime minister. During the Q&A after her speech she came close to losing her composure, and the footage of her, voice rising, claiming “nothing has changed” (as she confirmed that it has) was an image consultant’s nightmare.
In particular, she has inflicted serious damage on the “May brand” in three ways.
1 - May does not look so “strong and stable” anymore. Until the manifesto came out, “strong and stable leadership” was almost the entire Conservative campaign. Even today, May was pushing this message strongly. (See 10.34am.) Now it looks far less plausible.
2 - This undermines the Tories’ reputation for financial competence. Imposing a cap on social care costs will significantly increase the costs of social care, probably by a matter of billions per year over the next decade. But we don’t know by how much, because the Tories never gave any indication of how much their plans were expected to raise when they announced them last week, and they are not giving any clue as to what level the cap will be imposed at. The Labour party would be crucified if it made policy in such a costings vacuum.
3 - May was remarkably dishonest when she tried to defend her U-turn. After calling an election when she said she wouldn’t, May’s claim to be a straightforward and reliable politician was open to challenge, but today she waded fully into Pinocchio territory. She claimed this morning that she was only having to clarify her position because Labour and Jeremy Corbyn had been making “fake claims” about the manifesto. But this is simply not true; the Labour claims about a “dementia tax” have been based on a tendentious but accurate assumption about what the plans announced last week would mean. (May seemed to imply that a cap on social care costs was implied in what the manifesto said last week, if not stated explicitly, but this is not true; the manifesto said the plans for a floor not a cap on costs - see 11.57am - were “more equitable, within and across the generations, than the proposals following the Dilnot report [Dilnot proposed a cap], which mostly benefited a small number of wealthier people.) May is right to say her manifesto plans would not mean people losing their home while they are alive, and in her head she may be using this to justify her claim that her plans were being misrepresented. But Labour has not been saying people would lose their homes while still alive.
Updated
At the Labour launch Jeremy Corbyn welcomes the U-turn. He says that if George Osborne is now doing something useful with his life, that is to be welcomed.
Q: Someone with dementia will have to use up their inheritance. But someone who dies of cancer will be able to pass on £1m because you have raised the inheritance tax threshold. So it is a dementia tax. How is that fair?
May is shaking her head as the question gets asked, objecting to the term dementia tax.
She says the questioner (my colleague Jessica Elgot) is using a term used by the Labour party.
Updated
Q: Will anything else in the manifesto change?
May says nothing has changed. She says she has offered a sustainable solution to the problem of social care.
Q: Why did you grant asylum to the man arrested for the killing of Yvonne Fletcher?
May says there are rules that apply to the granting of asylum.
May invites a question from the Daily Post (the north Wales paper).
Q: What guarantees can you give to farmers?
May says the government will devise its own system of support for farmers. It will be devised by us, not someone else.
Q: [From Channel 4 News’ Michael Crick] I don’t recall another election manifesto U-turn. The lady is for turning. Doesn’t this show you are wobbly. What will the cap be? £100,000, £200,000, £500,000?
May says she has not changed the principles behind what she is proposing.
Updated
Q: You have buckled under pressure. Isn’t this just an attempt to save votes?
May says she has been clear about the principles that will apply. But she has clarified now that there will be an upper limit people will have to pay.
She says she is lifting the amount that people can keep to four times the level it is now.
This will produce a sustainable solution, she says.
Q: Isn’t this a manifesto of chaos now? What else will you qualify in the next few days? And what message does it send out to EU leaders, that you are prepared to budge?
May says this shows she is prepared to take tough decisions.
People have a choice, between Jeremy Corbyn and his coalition of chaos, and a government led by her, which has a plan to fix things.
Updated
May's Q&A
Q: [From the BBC’s Laura Kuennsberg] You say Corbyn is indecisive. But you have announced a major change to your manifesto. That is not strong and stable, is it. And where will the cap be imposed?
May says she is setting out a long-term plan for addressing the social care crisis.
We have to start dealing with this now.
The plans are clear in the manifesto. We said we would issue a green paper, she says. And of course we will consult on the plans.
May says Corbyn has claimed elderly people will have to lose their homes. No one will have to lose their family home while they are alive, she says.
Those are the proposals she is putting forward, she says.
Why May's comment about Corbyn making 'fake claims' about Tory manifesto is not true
May’s claim that her manifesto plans on social care were subject to “fake claims made by Jeremy Corbyn” (see 11.48am) is not true.
This is what the manifesto said about social care. It promised a “floor” for costs - a maximum that people would be allowed to retain, when they are paying their care costs, so that people would be allowed to keep their last £100,000. But it did not propose a “cap”, a maximum amount that people would have to spend.
Corbyn’s claim that this would lead to some people pay more was entirely correct.
For the record, this is what the Tory manifesto said.
Under the current system, care costs deplete an individual’s assets, including in some cases the family home, down to £23,250 or even less. These costs can be catastrophic for those with modest or medium wealth. One purpose of long-term saving is to cover needs in old age; those who can should rightly contribute to their care from savings and accumulated wealth, rather than expecting current and future taxpayers to carry the cost on their behalf. Moreover, many older people have built considerable property assets due to rising property prices. Reconciling these competing pressures fairly and in a sustainable way has challenged many governments of the past. We intend to tackle this with three connected measures.
First, we will align the future basis for means-testing for domiciliary care with that for residential care, so that people are looked after in the place that is best for them. This will mean that the value of the family home will be taken into account along with other assets and income, whether care is provided at home, or in a residential or nursing care home.
Second, to ensure this is fair, we will introduce a single capital floor, set at £100,000, more than four times the current means test threshold. This will ensure that, no matter how large the cost of care turns out to be, people will always retain at least £100,000 of their savings and assets, including value in the family home.
Third, we will extend the current freedom to defer payments for residential care to those receiving care at home, so no-one will have to sell their home in their lifetime to pay for care.
May confirms Tories would cap costs in major social care U-turn
May goes on:
But since my manifesto was published, the proposals have been subject to fake claims made by Jeremy Corbyn. The only things he has left to offer in this campaign are fake claims, fear and scare-mongering. So I want to make a further point clear. This manifesto says that we will come forward with a consultation paper, a government green paper. And that consultation will include an absolute limit on the amount people have to pay for their care costs.
So let me reiterate. We are proposing the right funding model for social care. We will make sure nobody has to sell their family home to pay for care. We will make sure there’s an absolute limit on what people need to pay. And you will never have to go below £100,000 of your savings, so you will always have something to pass on to your family.
And what is Jeremy Corbyn’s plan? He can promise a nonsensical, fantasy policy that can only be funded through massive tax rises on younger generations. In fact, just recently he threatened to increase the basic rate of income tax for millions of people from 20 to 25 per cent to fund social care. That tells you everything you need to know about Jeremy Corbyn’s answer to the problem.
The alternative is that he sticks to the status quo, which too often provides poor care and leaves old and vulnerable people having to sell their family homes.
This manifesto provides a better way. With it I’m leading Britain, while Mr Corbyn is simply scaremongering among the elderly and the vulnerable.
Updated
May says Labour has been falsely claiming that people will lose their homes from the Tories’ social care policy.
So she wants to clarify the position, she says.
So today I want to put an end to Jeremy Corbyn’s fake claims and clarify any doubts about our social care policy and the family home. My manifesto is honest and upfront about our challenges. It includes plans to strengthen the social care system with more and sustainable funding to cope with the long-term pressures caused by the fact that we are an ageing society.
Jeremy Corbyn wants to duck this reality - and play politics. But there will be 2 million more people over 75 years old in Britain over the next decade alone. Our social care system will collapse unless we make some important decisions now about how we fund it.
That is why we have to act. And it is why – to give people security – we included in our plans measures to make sure nobody has to sell the family home to pay for care. And we also said that we would protect £100,000 of your savings so, however expensive your care, you can pass something on to your family.
Let’s be clear. This plan replaces the existing system where people often get poor quality care - and stand to lose almost all their savings and assets, including the family home. This plan addresses the worry people have when they have a loved one with a long-term condition, and they don’t know how they’re going to afford to care for them.
So these are good and sensible plans. They provide the beginning of a solution to social care without increasing taxes on younger generations. And, I should say, we are the only party in this election prepared to face up to the reality of our ageing society and offer a long-term solution.
Updated
George Osborne has tweeted the Evening Standard front page.
Our front page exclusive @EveningStandard on social care u-turn + @Arsenal isn't for sale & Charles Powell on risks of big Tory majority pic.twitter.com/wQwf290hzp
— George Osborne (@George_Osborne) May 22, 2017
This is what the Welsh Conservative manifesto says about social care.
Here's the crucial passages on social care in the Welsh Tory manifesto May launching. Much of it is devolved but will policy be pulped? pic.twitter.com/K1dFVTuu8u
— Jessica Elgot (@jessicaelgot) May 22, 2017
May says some Welsh constituencies have returned Labour MPs for more than a century. Labour thinks it is entitled to power, she says.
But she says services in Wales are poor. Schools are falling further and further behind, and the NHS is under-performing, she says.
May says the manifesto is a mainstream manifesto from a mainstream party determined to deliver for Britain.
Theresa May's speech
Theresa May is speaking in Wrexham now.
She starts with the material about Brexit I flagged up earlier. (See 10.34am.)
On The Andrew Marr Show yesterday (pdf) Damian Green, the work and pensions secretary, was asked: “Is there any chance at all you’re going to look at it [the social care policy] again?” Green replied:
No. What we said in the manifesto incidentally, just to put that no in context, is that we have set out this policy which we’re not going to look at again.
If May does announce a U-turn, as Sky and the Evening Standard are expecting (and we are not being told they are wrong), Green is going to find himself looking a bit daft.
He will be in the same position as Philip Hammond, the chancellor, who had to drop plans to raise national insurance for the self-employed less than a week after announing them in the budget.
Updated
An anti-fox hunting protester has been arrested as the prime minister’s car arrived in Wrexham ahead of the launch of the Conservative manifesto.
The man, who told reporters his name was Connor, waved a black flag and yelled “this is a fascist state, Theresa May’s police state”. He was then dragged to the ground by police as May’s motorcade swept past.
Blowing a horn, he attempted to move towards the car before he was tackled and pulled away, surrounded by hoards of photographers and journalists.
Two other protesters followed to demand to know the reason why he had been arrested. “This is a peaceful protest, you’ve no right to arrest him,” said one, who told the Guardian his name was Cookie.
“We see foxes killed every day, the ban isn’t enforced, every day just down the road, she doesn’t care about wildlife,” another protester said.
Sky’s Faisal Islam says the Conservatives’ green paper on social care, due after the election, will include plans for a cap.
He says the Tories do not accept that this is a U-turn - although, given that last week the Tories were ruling out a cap, most commentators will say that’s exactly what it is.
Theresa May is due to speak at the launch of the Welsh Conservatives’ manifesto imminently. She is likely to say more on this then.
Tories to perform U-turn over social care and impose cap on costs, Osborne says
George Osborne, the former Conservative chancellor who now edits the Evening Standard, says the government will perform a U-turn over social care, and impose a cap on costs.
U-turn coming on social care. There will be a cap. Read today's @EveningStandard for the details
— George Osborne (@George_Osborne) May 22, 2017
Updated
Labour announces plans for £1bn cultural capital fund
Jeremy Corbyn and Tom Watson, the deputy Labour leader and shadow culture secretary, have been in Hull this morning (the 2017 city of culture) to announce plans for a £1bn cultural capital fund.
This is what the party is saying about its plans in a news release.
Labour announces today that a £1bn culture capital fund will invest in ‘creative clusters’ across the country.
Labour will guarantee a creative future for all by:
- Establishing a £1bn cultural capital fund to support our world-leading cultural industries, which have been badly hit by Tory cuts.
The fund will be one of the largest arts infrastructure funds ever created. It will give the country’s creative sectors an opportunity to bid for extra funding and help the UK protect its status as a creative and cultural hub in the digital age.
It will protect and invest in live music venues in order to support grassroots and professional music and ensure there is a vibrant music industry in all parts of the country. Labour will review the business rates system and extend the £1,000 pub relief to help small music venues that have been hit by rate rises.
- Ensuring museums and art galleries remain free and invest in our heritage sector, which is central to the identity and economy of local communities across the country.
- Introducing a £160m arts pupil premium for every primary school in England to boost creative education and ensure state schools have arts facilities of an equivalent standard to those available in many private schools.
Updated
Bartley says it is disappointing that the Labour and Lib Dem leaders rejected calls for a “progressive alliance”. But in some seats there have been deals, he says. The Green party is ahead of the curve, he says. He says this is only the start.
And that’s it.
The launch is over.
My colleague Peter Walker will be filing more on it soon.
Lucas says, even if President Trump turns his back on the Paris climate change agreement, there is enough support for action against climate change around the world to ensure that the agreement survives.
Lucas says the Greens would not extend the Brexit negotiations.
But the Greens want the public, not parliament, to have the final say on the Brexit deal.
We have seen many Brexit policies unravelling, for example, such as the promised £350m extra a year for the NHS.
Caroline Lucas and Jonathan Bartley, the Green party co-leaders, are now taking questions.
Q: Aren’t your policies similar to Labour’s?
Lucas says they are. Imitation is the biggest form of flattery, she says.
But she says there is a key difference on Europe. Labour would offer the Tories a blank cheque on Brexit, she says.
Green party manifesto launch
The Green party is launching its manifesto.
There are details here, on the party’s website.
My colleague Peter Walker is there.
Fair to say the Greens' manifesto launch is shaping up to be more low key than those for Tories & Labour. pic.twitter.com/0cPqp9DLnW
— Peter Walker (@peterwalker99) May 22, 2017
In fairness they've already had a series of issues-based launches, so it should be viewed as a cumulative total.
— Peter Walker (@peterwalker99) May 22, 2017
Green co-leader Jonathan Bartley now introducing what he calls the party's "big, bold" manifesto - titled the Green Guarantee. pic.twitter.com/JczDhFQVXN
— Peter Walker (@peterwalker99) May 22, 2017
Bartley says Greens a choice for those who believe "things can change for the better in the future".
— Peter Walker (@peterwalker99) May 22, 2017
Caroline Lucas: Green manifesto "is about hope - and we need hope now more than ever". She mentions basic income & shorter working week
— Peter Walker (@peterwalker99) May 22, 2017
Lucas says Greens defend free moment in EU, saying "to live, to learn, to love" in 27 other nations is "a gift".
— Peter Walker (@peterwalker99) May 22, 2017
May condemns politicians for issuing 'hysterical warnings' about Brexit
Later this morning Theresa May will be speaking at the launch of the Welsh Conservative manifesto, and some extracts from her speech have been released in advance. Often these overnight releases are fairly anodyne, but there are some interesting lines in what May will say.
- May will condemn politicians for issuing “hysterical warnings” about Brexit. And she appears to praise the Welsh for ignoring them. She will say:
Because too often in the past, ordinary working people have found the help and support they need just isn’t there.
And I know that sense of disenchantment is particularly acute here in Wales. We saw that when people here in Wrexham and across Wales chose to ignore the hysterical warnings of Labour, Plaid Cymru and Liberal Democrat politicians in Cardiff Bay, and voted to leave the EU.
In the extracts we’ve seen, May forgets to mention that she also warned people not to vote for Brexit – although, to be fair, her arguments against leaving the EU were measured, and she said the sky would not fall in if the UK did leave.
This line could also be seen as a dig at George Osborne, whose claim that Brexit would necessitate an emergency, tax-raising budget during the EU referendum campaign was also seen as hysterical. May sacked Osborne when she became PM and does not seem to feel any warmer about him now. There was a sly dig in her Times interview on Saturday, (paywall) when May, asked about the Evening Standard, now edited by Osborne, replied: “I have to confess, absolutely honestly, [I have] only ever in my life occasionally flicked through the Evening Standard.”
- She says that the UK must be represented in the Brexit talks by someone “100% committed to the cause”.
Because our future prosperity depends on getting the next five years right.
That is why we need someone representing Britain who is 100% committed to the cause. Not someone who is uncertain or unsure, but someone utterly determined to deliver the democratic will of the British people.
May, of course, voted for the UK to stay in the EU. Until recently, when asked in interviews whether she has changed her mind about Brexit and now thinks it is a good idea, or whether she still thinks it is bad idea but is just going along with it anyway, she has dodged the question, saying that because people voted for Brexit, it must happen, and that the important thing is to make it work.
But, increasingly, May is starting to sound like a true believer. In the Commons earlier this year she said that staying in the single market would effectively mean staying in the EU, a Ukip argument that no remain supporter would accept. At her press conference last week she refused to accept that Brexit was to blame for the slump in sterling that has pushed up inflation, hitting living standards; this is remain orthodoxy, and at least 90% true, but an uncomfortable fact for leave true believers to accept. And now she is saying she is “100% committed to the cause”.
- She urges people to vote Tory to stop Jeremy Corbyn being at the “negotiating table” for the Brexit talks. She mentions the prospect of Corbyn being at the “negotiating table” or in the “negotiating chamber” twice. For example, she says:
Just 11 days after that the European Union wants the Brexit negotiations to begin.
The UK’s seat at the negotiating table will be filled by me or Jeremy Corbyn. The deal we seek will be negotiated by me or Jeremy Corbyn.
There is nothing particularly new about this, because May has conjured up this image repeatedly in her standard stump speech. But today’s comments suggest she is redoubling efforts to put the image of Corbyn on the train to Brussels to negotiate on behalf of the UK in the minds of voters. If you want to know why, read this, from Lord Ashcroft’s latest account of what focus groups are saying about the election. It is from focus groups conducted in three Labour-held seats in the north of England.
Those with doubts [about Labour] – particularly those previous Labour supporters who had voted leave last year – kept coming back to one point: “I would have voted Labour as per usual but I’m not sure that gentleman is the right one to go into the negotiations on coming out.” For some distressed remainers, it hardly mattered who was speaking for Britain (“We’ll get what we’re given. We’re outnumbered, we’re in a parlous position. We’ll rue the day, whoever is leading the so-called negotiations”), but for many others, which team would represent the country was the single biggest point at stake: “That’s the main thing for me that may swing me from Labour to Conservative”; “Brexit plays a part because there’s been nothing mentioned that I’ve seen about if Labour do get in, what are their plans? At least Theresa May is putting a plan into place.”
Updated
Ukip are holding a press conference this morning, about protecting the older generation. But, as the Sun’s Harry Cole says, press interest isn’t exactly high.
3 scribes, a snapper + cameraman at UKIP's latest morning presser. Only party bothering, but appeal waning with 2 and half weeks to go... pic.twitter.com/bLVTvttm0n
— Harry Cole (@MrHarryCole) May 22, 2017
I’ll post some more about it when I’ve got an account of what was said.
Pound hit by 'dementia tax' backlash
Theresa May already has a reputation for talking the pound down, and the Conservative party manifesto is reinforcing it this morning.
Sterling has fallen by almost 0.5% against the US dollar in early trading, falling to $1.297, having hit a seven-month high last week.
The backlash against the PM’s proposals for social care, and opinion polls showing the Tory lead narrowing to nine points, is causing some anxiety in the City this morning.
Investors are rethinking their assumption that May would secure a landslide win, giving her a stronger hand to deliver a “smooth Brexit”.
Kathleen Brooks of City Index says the pound is suffering because May’s manifesto has “gone down like a lead balloon” with core voters.
She adds:
While a nine-point lead could still give Theresa May a comfortable victory on 8 June, the fact her lead has been slashed in half in just a few days may reinforce to financial markets that her victory is not a certainty.
With three weeks to go before the election, another bad PR week for PM May and her team and the Tories’ lead over Labour could fall further into the low single figures, which could encourage sterling selling ahead of this crucial vote.
This is from Howard Archer, economist at data firm IHS Markit:
#Sterling on back foot & back under US$1.30 against #dollar as lack of major #UK #economic news puts #market focus on #Tory dip in polls
— Howard Archer (@HowardArcherUK) May 22, 2017
Back in early October, the pound tumbled by 1% when May announced she would trigger article 50 by the end of March this year. Sterling then suffered a mysterious ‘flash crash’ just days after the Tory party conference, where ministers signalled that a hard Brexit was likely.
Fast-forward to early January, and the pound was knocked back to just $1.21 after May insisted that Britain couldn’t hold on to parts of its EU membership. It fell further ahead of the PM’s Lancaster House speech, where she declared that Britain would leave the single market (but rallied once the speech was actually delivered).
There is more on the business live blog.
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Just to make things complicated, even though the FT splash headline (see 8.38am) is using the term “dementia tax” (in recognition of the fact that this is a term that is sticking), the FT’s editor Lional Barber has tweeted an article to an FT article by Merryn Somerset Webb, the editor-in-chief of MoneyWeek, saying the plan to charge some homeowners more if the need care in their own home is not a tax.
Smart read: why "Dementia Tax" is not a tax at all. It's the price we all have to pay for social care https://t.co/15zQ49kvM7 via @FT
— Lionel Barber (@lionelbarber) May 21, 2017
Here’s an extract from the article.
It isn’t a tax. One smarty pants started referring to the policy online as the “dementia tax”. That’s clever, but also nonsense. A tax is a cash contribution to the state’s coffers, taken directly from your income or tacked on to the cost of something you buy. It is money to be pooled to finance the needs of the population as a whole.
This instead is simply a system that helps you pay for your own needs with your own money. Start adding “tax” to the description of everything you pay for out of your net income and life quickly gets a bit silly. You pay for your own pants rather than contributing to a hypothecated underwear fund on an annual basis. But do you feel peeved about the “knicker tax” every time you go into M&S? I suspect not.
And here is her verdict on why she backs the Tory policy.
It is a simple solution to the ongoing problem of the cost of care. It is a neat political way to marry individual responsibility and state support.
It is also an exposure of the biggest lie in British politics: that national insurance is a separate levy which is set aside to pay for this kind of thing. It isn’t. Anyone who starts a conversation about social care with “I’ve paid in all my life” needs to get this. And finally it is a happy recognition that while there aren’t many problems in the UK to which high house prices are the obvious answer, there are some. Financing social care is one of them.
In an interview with BBC Breakfast Angela Rayner also played down the significance of the Conservative attacks on Jeremy Corbyn over the terms in which he chose to condemn IRA bombing in an interview yesterday.
I think it’s a bit of a dead cat because the Conservatives know that at the moment they are on the rack, because they are trying to bring in a dementia tax which will hurt older people.
Jeremy Corbyn on Sophy Ridge did condemn the bombing (by the) IRA, he did condemn that bombing and he was quite clear about that.
Labour have got a proud record, under Tony Blair we brought about the peace process in Northern Ireland.
Jeremy has been absolutely clear, he condemns the bombing by the IRA in Northern Ireland and we want to continue to see that peace process flourish.
A “dead cat” is a distraction technique. It is a reference to a metaphor used by the Tory election strategist Lynton Crosby to describe the maneouvre.
(Not to be confused with a “dead cat bounce”, which is something different.)
Rayner claims May 'sneers' at her in the Commons
Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary, gave an interview to Sky News this morning, as well as to the Today programme. (See 7.35am.) On Sky she was asked about the people Theresa May named as her dream dinner party guests in a Sunday Telegraph interview, and whether she was disappointed not to be on the list. She replied:
I’m not surprised at all. Theresa May often looks at me and sneers when I see her opposite the dispatch box, so I’m not surprised she wouldn’t want me at her dinner party, to be honest. I’m probably not posh enough.
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The Conservatives are losing the battle to get people to stop calling their plans for social care a “dementia tax”. As the Independent’s Jon Stone points out, if the FT is calling it that, than that’s as good as official.
If the FT is using ‘Dementia Tax’ on its front page then it’s basically the official name of the policy pic.twitter.com/qwXTZ5zoXq
— Jon Stone (@joncstone) May 21, 2017
As Guardian Politics points out on Twitter, the Tories are trying to counter this using Google advertising.
The @conservatives are advertising their social care manifesto policy against the phrase #dementiatax in Google pic.twitter.com/lDBvVZmySz
— Guardian politics (@GdnPolitics) May 22, 2017
Clegg says the first-past-the-post system is “loopy”. At the last election almost 4m people voted for Ukip, “and all they got for that was Douglas Carswell” (ie, just one MP).
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Clegg says people have more control over their daily lives. Yet politics is still slow and archaic.
But he says he wants to speak up for politicians. British MPs make themselves available to their constituents. Compared with politicians in other countries, they spend much more time making themselves available to citizens. He hopes that does not change.
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Here is Sarah Sands, the new Today editor, explaining why Nick Clegg is being interviewed.
We are looking at young voters on Today. Those getting them out to vote and Nick Clegg coming up on university fees.
— sarah sands (@sarahsands100) May 22, 2017
Clegg says young people voted in overwhelming numbers last year. They have been ignored. Brexit is an act of generational theft, he says.
John Humphrys is interviewing Nick Clegg. The interview is focusing on voter turnout.
Q: It’s your fault, isn’t it? (Clegg was in charge of constitutional reform in the coalition government)
Clegg says politicians always get blamed. We were told the election would be about Brexit. But Theresa May only wants to talk about herself, and Jeremy Corbyn wants to talk about anything but Brexit.
He says elections have become a form of displacement activity.
Q: People say politicians make promises they don’t keep, as you did over tuition fees.
Clegg accepts that. He says Labour is now promising lots of goodies.
Q: Presumably you approve of the Labour policy.
Clegg says Labour introduced them in the first place. He says he does not think Labour could pay for its promise. And he thinks it is the wrong choice now. It would cost £9bn, with some of the money coming from people who don’t go to university. And Labour is not reversing all the benefits cuts. He says he would make that his priority, not getting rid of tuition fees.
- Clegg claims Labour could not fund its latest tuition fee abolition policy.
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Nick Clegg's Today interview.
Good morning. I’m taking over from Claire.
Nick Clegg is about to be interviewed on the Today programme.
I’m handing over the live blog now to Andrew Sparrow to steer you through the rest of the day.
To have the Snap election briefing deposited in your inbox tomorrow, and every weekday, morning, do sign up here.
Sinn Féin’s John O’Dowd has been speaking to the Today programme; the party launches its manifesto today, though its MPs do not take up their seats in Westminster.
A central part of Sinn Féin’s manifesto is concern over the future of the soft border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic once Brexit happens. It is calling for NI to have an “EU-designated special status” that would retain a link between the two.
O’Dowd says:
The EU played a role in bringing that conflict to an end …
What we’re seeking is continued representation in the European parliament under the north-south ministerial council … that we’d still be able to access council meetings, that we’d still be able to access funding.
Access to the European court of justice would be part of any deal, he says.
He says such a move would not mean there would need to be a border poll, though Sinn Féin of course still supports such a referendum:
We’re not suggesting at this stage that sovereignty would change.
Rather, he says, it reflects the fact that Northern Ireland did not vote leave:
The majority of people here voted to stay within the EU – that vote was across unionism and nationalism.
And he says there’ll be no change to the policy of not taking up Westminster seats:
Westminster is not a listening bureau … There is no example I can look at … where Irish nationalists have been able to influence the actions in Westminster.
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People could get a universal basic income and a shorter working week under plans to be proposed by the Green party on Monday.
Caroline Lucas, the party’s co-leader, said the proposals were “big, bold ideas to create a confident and caring country we can all be proud of”.
The party’s flagship pledges, called their “green guarantee”, would reverse the privatisation of the NHS and fill the funding gap in the health service, paid for partly by scrapping the UK’s Trident nuclear deterrent.
It would also promise another referendum when Britain strikes its Brexit deal and guarantee EU citizens rights.
But its most radical proposals are a promise to work towards the introduction of a universal basic income – a flat rate paid to everyone whether or not they are in work.
A universal basic income is regarded by some on the left as a response to the robotisation of the workforce, which it is feared could replace lower-skilled jobs and exacerbate inequality
The Greens said the proposal would initially take the form of a government-sponsored pilot scheme and the phasing in a of a shorter working week.
And with Labour having promised to scrap university tuition fees if elected, the Greens last week went one step further, with a pledge to write off all existing student loan debts, at a cost of more than £14bn over the next parliament.
Angela Rayner Today interview
Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary, has been speaking to the Today programme about the tuition fee pledge. She confirms:
As of September, students going to university will not pay tuition fees.
Rayner says that adds up to a cost of £9.5bn annually, or £11.2bn if you add in maintenance grants:
We believe that’s a small price to pay for ensuring young people are not saddled with £45,000 in debt.
She says Labour has accounted for this in its manifesto:
That extra money is within the overall costings that we have … The Conservatives have not produced any costings.
We’re quite clear in ours … There is room within that.
Having promised to scrap fees, it had to be done as soon as possible, Rayner says:
We don’t want students to defer from this year.
Against accusations that scrapping fees for all students actually benefits the better-off, Rayner says that even if fees are not paid back (if the graduate does not meet the earnings threshold) it still has a negative effect:
The most disadvantaged students … have this hanging over their heads for longer.
If you’ve ever had a huge amount of debt hanging over your head, you know how that feels.
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Registration to vote closes today
With the deadline tonight for voters to register for the 8 June election, the Electoral Commission says 15% of those eligible – that’s 7 million people – are not signed up.
It says more than 2.3m applications to register have been received since the snap election was called – although some of those people will already have been on the electoral roll.
Last year, as the midnight cut-off to register for the EU referendum approach, the website crashed as last-minute applications surged, forcing an extension to the deadline.
Those who haven’t yet put their names down (and I’m going to guess that most readers of a politics live blog have done so), can do it online here. That’s not for readers in Northern Ireland, unfortunately: you’ll need to download a form from this site and take it to your local area electoral office.
Updated
Jeremy Corbyn will say today that under a Labour government, university tuition fees would effectively be scrapped from autumn this year. Effectively because legislation to abolish the fees wouldn’t be implemented before the start of the academic year, but for the year starting autumn 2018. Mindful that that could lead to a stampede of deferments from this year’s intake – as well as a few “not fair”s – Corbyn will say that students starting courses this year would have their first tranche of fees retrospectively written off.
Those already studying would not have to pay from autumn 2018 onwards.
Labour is hoping that today’s announcement will bounce more young people into registering to vote: the deadline is 11.59pm today and you can sign up here.
The Snap: your election briefing
Welcome back to the antepenultimate week of campaigning – and the last day on which you can register to vote – before polling day. I’m Claire Phipps with your whip-through of the morning’s election news; Andrew Sparrow picks up the live blog later. Do join us in the comments or on Twitter @Claire_Phipps.
What’s happening?
It turns out there was something Theresa May could do to prod her polling lead over Jeremy Corbyn down to single figures, and that something was the manifesto commitment to require older people to fund their own social care from all assets over £100,000. Or, as it’s become more snappily if not cheerily nicknamed, the dementia tax.
Labour leaflets have swiftly sprung up promising to “fight the Tories’ unfair dementia tax”, and Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron has labelled it “Theresa May’s poll tax”, amid warnings the proposal is unworkable and chatter that the proposal is not playing well on the doorstep – up to now the PM’s safe space.
Lurching to its defence yesterday came foreign secretary Boris Johnson, who said the policy was not set in stone (“I do understand people’s reservations … there will be a consultation on getting it right”); and work and pensions secretary Damian Green, who said it was (“We have set out this policy, which we’re not going to look at again.”). Who to believe? Given that Johnson clearly attended an alternate Conservative launch, with a manifesto that included within its pages the bus-tastic £350m a a week for the NHS – “It is. It is. Theresa May, she said it at the launch of the manifesto,” he burbled yesterday – we can probably place his assurances in the piffle pile.
With reports that cabinet ministers were not told about the plans much before the ferociously upbeat “you don’t have to sell your house! (until you’re dead)” pre-briefings for the manifesto, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that they’re still a little hazy on it. Certainly, the PM forgot to mention the social care policy in her lengthy Facebook post comparing her own manifesto with Labour’s, “written and shaped by a leader who doesn’t understand – or like – our country”.
Time, surely, to sound the red, white and blue Brexit klaxon. May will be in Wales today, instructing voters that, with talks on Britain’s EU exit due to begin less than a fortnight after the election:
There will be no time to waste and no time for a new government to find its way. So the stakes in this election are high.
So tricky, isn’t it, when an election just happens to fall right before such a key date?
Brexit also dominated last night’s BBC debate in Scotland, as six party leaders who (mostly) are not standing for Westminster election tussled over what would happen to a country that didn’t vote to leave the EU. Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson accused her SNP counterpart of not knowing her place:
Nicola Sturgeon says she wants a seat at the Brexit table, but she wants Scotland to be out of the UK and into the eurozone. I ask myself, which side of the table does she want to be sat on?
But Sturgeon wasn’t engaging in this musical chairs without an adversary, pointing out that Davidson had been a remainer, then a fan of Scotland staying in the single market, before converting enthusiastically to the harder Tory line:
First she said we needed a seat at the negotiating table and now she has changed her mind. It seems to me that Ruth Davidson does everything that Theresa May tells her to do.
Scottish Labour – wilting in the Scotland-wide polls in third place on 19% – will launch its manifesto today (along with its Welsh counterpart, the Welsh Conservatives, Sinn Féin and the UK Greens, who are heralding a universal basic income).
Jeremy Corbyn has more to trumpet today, too, with an enticement that a Labour government could scrap university fees as early as this autumn, and plans for a £1bn fund to invest in the arts. He previewed this with an appearance at the Wirral Live music festival, opening for the Libertines with a selection of his greatest hits.
It went better than his appearance on Sky News on Sunday, where some of his older material got an airing. Did he condemn the IRA? After five or so feints, he went with a yes:
I condemn all the bombings by both the loyalists and the IRA.
It can be hard to keep track of what politicians believed then and now. Take the PM. Only last year, it seems, she was a remainer. But today she’ll praise the vote-leavers of Wales for paying no heed to all those naysayers:
People here in Wrexham and across Wales chose to ignore the hysterical warnings of Labour, Plaid Cymru and Liberal Democrat politicians in Cardiff Bay, and voted to leave the EU.
Welsh Conservative leader Andrew RT Davies did urge a vote to leave. But those who can raid their memories of 2016 might recall some – even quite prominent – Tories on the side of those “hysterical” warning-mongers.
At a glance:
- NHS funding pledges by major parties would still fall short, experts say.
- Labour risks losing more minority ethnic voters to Tories, study finds.
- Candidates hold one-hour pause in campaigning to remember Jo Cox.
- Frank Field: if Labour loses, a new leader must be chosen by the PLP alone – with Corbyn’s manifesto as the starting point.
Poll position
Weekend polling – and a fresh survey this morning – show the Tory lead over Labour is thinning. A telephone poll by Survation for ITV’s Good Morning Britain, published today, puts that lead at nine points: half what it was a week ago. The Conservatives have mislaid five points to 43%, with Labour perking up five to 34%, and the Lib Dems right where they were on 8%.
YouGov for the Sunday Times also pegged the lead at nine points, with Team Theresa May down one point to 44% in the wake of the manifesto, and Labour up three to 35%.
But elsewhere, it was still a double-figure lead. A separate Survation poll for the Mail on Sunday had a 12-point advantage (46% v 34%), as did ORB for the Sunday Telegraph, on the same percentages. An Observer/Opinium poll has it at 13 points: that’s down six for the Tories from last month and up seven for Labour.
The Lib Dems don’t crack double digits in any of them.
Diary
- An ostentation of manifestos today: the “Green guarantee” with co-leaders Caroline Lucas and Jonathan Bartley at 10.30am in London; Kezia Dugdale presents the Scottish Labour version at 11am in Edinburgh; the Welsh Conservatives’ launch in Wrexham follows swiftly after that, guest-starring Theresa May; then it’s Flintshire at 12.30 for Carwyn Jones’ revelation of the Welsh Labour paperwork. Sinn Féin also spells out its plans today.
- Jeremy Corbyn and Tom Watson are in Hull, the 2017 city of culture, for their arts manifesto.
- At 7pm, Andrew Neil interviews Theresa May on BBC1.
Read these
In the Guardian, Gary Younge says Corbyn is now Labour’s best hope for the future:
Herein lies one of the two key problems with the ‘anybody but Corbyn’ brigade. First, they don’t have ‘anybody’. Corbyn’s leadership does come up on the doorstep as a problem – but Owen Smith or Liz Kendall do not come up as solutions. There is no charismatic standard-bearer waiting in the wings. Second, even if they did have a candidate, they do not have an agenda. For a while it wasn’t obvious that Corbyn did either…
The manifesto has had an almost therapeutic effect. Beyond reintroducing basic social democratic policies to the arena, it provides the clearest illustration yet of what the last two traumatic years within the Labour party have been about. This unexpected left turn in the party’s leadership was, it turns out, not about delivering the party to Hamas, but delivering decent public services and a programme for tackling inequality.
In the Times, Libby Purves says the Tory manifesto is right to expect older people to contribute to the care they need:
It’s a bold move, and though tweaks and explanations are needed, a necessary one. Those shouting ‘dementia tax’ – often panicking Conservative candidates – are closing their eyes to two things. One is the reality of an ageing population. The other is that the present low, underpaid standard of home care simply will not do…
If an old person needs home care – let me speak, I’ll be one sooner than many who read this – then for heaven’s sake let the damn house contribute. For my generation it is a piece of accidental, unearned bunce anyway: we just wanted somewhere to live and had no idea it would become a moneybox.
Revelation of the day
Ukip will slip out its manifesto on Wednesday but leader Paul Nuttall doesn’t seem that concerned about using it as a springboard to power. Pressed yesterday on how much influence a party polling around 2%, standing in far fewer seats than last time, and with little chance of regaining a toehold in Westminster could wield, Nuttall insisted:
It doesn’t really matter how many MPs that you have.
The day in a tweet
You’re clearly electorally switched-on enough to be reading a campaign briefing but just in case:
The deadline to register for the #GE2017 is Monday. Don’t miss your chance! Register now at https://t.co/XyCsSZbKim #YourVoteMaters pic.twitter.com/tnjAq9KDbP
— Your Vote Matters (@YourVote_UK) May 18, 2017
And another thing
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