Afternoon summary
- Theresa May has suggested she needs a large majority so that in the Brexit negotiations she can match the “strong mandate” secured by the new French president Emmanuel Macron. (See 12.46pm.)
- The Conservatives have accused the Lib Dem Sir Vince Cable of “scheming” to help Labour get into power after it released a recording of him discussing how anti-Tory parties could help each other informally at the election. (See 2.44pm.)
- The former Labour MP Simon Danczuk has resigned from the party, saying it has “lost touch with reality”. (See 5.48pm.)
That’s all from me for tonight.
Thanks for the comments.
Simon Danczuk resigns from Labour, saying party has 'totally lost touch with reality'
Simon Danczuk, who was told last week that he could not stand again as a Labour candidate in Rochdale because he is still suspended from the party over allegations he sent explicit text messages to a 17-year-old girl, has resigned from the party.
In his resignation letter, which he posted on Twitter, he said Labour has “totally lost touch ... with reality in 21st century Britain”.
My resignation letter from the Labour Party. pic.twitter.com/klqqzHVrTQ
— Simon Danczuk (@SimonDanczuk) May 8, 2017
Paul Nuttall has said he will “probably at some point” stay the night in the Lincolnshire constituency he is aiming to win.
The Ukip leader has previously defended his plan to stand for election in Boston and Skegness, arguing most MPs are not from their constituency.
At his policy launch this morning (see 11.35am), asked if he had bought a house in the constituency, Nuttall told reporters:
Firstly, I haven’t bought a house in Boston and Skegness but nor did I buy a house in Stoke - just so you know that, we rented it. Will I be staying in the constituency? Probably at some point, yes.
Just to make the Lib Dem Karl Marx/Vince Cable nonsense (see 4.30pm) even more awkward, the Lib Dems have today announced that Cable has been made the party’s Treasury spokesman.
Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Conservative leader, claimed the election in Scotland was “a two-horse race” between her party and the SNP as she announced her campaign in Edinburgh. She said:
Caveats do apply, but even that notwithstanding, you see that this is pretty much a two-horse race [between the Tories and the SNP] in vast swathes of the country now.
We are in the mix or ahead of the game in the Borders, Dumfries and Galloway, bits of Ayrshire, in Renfrewshire, Edinburgh, Perthshire, Stirlingshire, Angus, right the way up to Banffshire, Aberdeenshire and across to Moray.
We’ve got lots of work to do ... but it was a very encouraging result last week [see 1.05pm], and we take that [and] put a spring in our step as we go forward.
But we are the underdogs in this.
Jeremy Corbyn has apparently told a group of young supporters to give under-pressure Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger a chance after they held up a “Wenger Out” sign at one of his rallies, the Press Association reports.
One of the group, A-level student Jacob, who did not want to give his full name as he was skipping school to be there, joked that he wanted Mr Corbyn to “nationalise Arsenal”.
“We know he supports Arsenal and we wanted to get his thoughts on Wenger because you know if Jeremy wins we want him to nationalise Arsenal, put all the money back into them. He’s doing it for the railways,” he said.
Another, Ed, said they just wanted to make their feelings about Arsenal’s long-serving manager known: “What a place to do it as well, there’s so much participation, so many people out there, everyone is getting their messages across, why not get one more across?”
They revealed Corbyn told them “Wenger’s all right, give him a chance,” after he had finished his speech at the Leamington Spa rally.
A new Welsh Political Barometer poll is out today. It suggests the Conservatives are still on course to beat Labour, although the gap between the two parties is smaller than in the last poll in this series towards the end of last month.
Westminster voting intention (Wales)
— YouGov (@YouGov) May 8, 2017
Con 41%
Lab 35%
PC 11%
LD 7%
UKIP 4%
Oth 2%
(Fieldwork 5-7 May)https://t.co/7lJD9ZoqWK pic.twitter.com/UPvJx6cwAF
In his analysis of the figures Prof Roger Scully says that, if these results were replicated at the election, the Conservatives would win 20 seats in Wales (up 9), Labour 16 (down 9), Plaid Cymru 3 and the Lib Dems 1 (no change respectively.) He goes on:
Despite the recovery in Labour support since our previous poll, the Conservatives are still projected to gain nine seats from Labour: Alyn and Deeside, Bridgend, Cardiff West, Clwyd South, Delyn, Newport East, Newport West, Wrexham, and Ynys Mon. Although this projection is one seat better for Labour than our last poll, such a result would nonetheless decisively break Labour’s record of coming first in both votes and seats in Wales at every general election from 1922 onwards.
Kezia Dugdale, the Scottish Labour leader, said today there was still fight left in her party, despite its “disappointing” performance in the Scottish local elections last week. She said:
I think you need to put the results in a bit of context because if you were looking at papers two weeks ago you were looking at polls which showed Labour on 13%, 14%, 15%.
The commentariat were predicting we would lose every single one of our councils and we would lose half of our councillors.
The results show today we are into the 20% territory, we became top of the table in three councils, we shared position in a fourth and came second by one seat in two councils on top of that.
Of course, it was a disappointing set of results, I’m always going to be disappointed by results which show Labour not winning. But there’s fight left there.
Theresa May called in at an aviation school for a closely stage-managed visit, with journalists kept in a side room, the Press Association reports.
She visited the International Aviation Academy at Norwich Airport, which is in the Conservative-held Norwich North constituency, on Monday.
Aides directed journalists into a side room before she arrived and members of the media were instructed to stay there for most of the visit.
The group was allowed through to a hangar where May spoke to aviation students before being shepherded back into the holding room.
A small group of photographers and TV cameras were permitted to observe her visiting a classroom, before TV crews from ITV Anglia and local BBC were allotted time for brief interviews with May. Local paper the Eastern Daily Press was also allotted an interview with May.
The rest of the group of journalists remained in the room throughout. Photographers asked whether they could take pictures of May leaving the site. They were told they could not.
The neighbouring constituency of Norwich South is one of just two Labour-held constituencies in East Anglia. The other is Cambridge.
Earlier the Lib Dem press office put out a statement from Tom Brake criticising Jeremy Corbyn for describing Karl Marx as a great economist. (See 3.37pm.)
Oops. When the Lib Dem Vince Cable was business secretary in the coalition government, he co-wrote an article for the Mail listing 10 of the greatest economists - including Marx. Perhaps Brake will denounce him too.
Labour has released some detail of how it would fund its plan to abolish hospital parking charges in England.
Parking charges in hospitals in England raise £162m, the party says. Allowing for money that would have to be allocated to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland too, the total policy would cost £190m a year, the party says.
Labour says it will raise the money by increasing insurance premium tax for private health insurance. Currently this is levied at 12%, and Labour would put it up to 20%. Depending on what figures you use, this would raise either £377m or £221m, but easily enough to cover the pledge, it says.
The Conservatives and the Lib Dems have both criticised the announcement - but without saying it is a bad idea. They have just issued generic ‘you can’t trust Labour’ statements.
A Conservative spokesman said:
This promise isn’t worth the paper it’s written on because Jeremy Corbyn simply wouldn’t be able to deliver it. With Corbyn in charge of our Brexit negotiations, the economy and our NHS would be at grave risk. There would be less money to spend in hospitals, not more.
And a Lib Dem spokesman said:
Labour have failed as an opposition and voted with the Conservatives for a Hard Brexit that will mean less money for the NHS.
Labour are hoping their new hospital car parking policy might win the backing of Theresa May. The party points out that, when the Tories were in opposition, she campaigned against the introduction of parking charges at St Marks, a hospital in her Maidenhead constituency.
Tories and Lib Dem criticise Corbyn for saying Marx was one of the great economists
Jeremy Corbyn’s comments earlier about Karl Marx seemed quite innocuous. (See 1.29pm.) Anyone who studies economics or political theory has to read him and it is quite possible to refer to him as one of the “great economists” (as Corbyn did) without endorsing all aspects of Soviet centralised planning.
But that hasn’t stopped both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats putting out press notices denouncing the Labour leader for his comment. The Tory one quotes James Cleverly, the Conservative candidate for Braintree, saying:
First John McDonnell said there’s a ‘lot to learn’ from Karl Marx, now Jeremy Corbyn calls him a ‘great economist’ who is shaping Labour policy.
It’s clear these two Marx brothers are determined to unleash their hero’s dangerous ideas on Britain - sending taxes soaring and destroying jobs.
And the Lib Dems have issued a statement from Tom Brake saying:
Corbyn and [John] McDonnell seem to be competing to see who can make Labour more unelectable. At this rate, the Labour manifesto will be laced with quotes from Das Kapital.
Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, visited the Inveralmond Brewery in Perth, earlier, backing the SNP’s candidate Pete Wishart. She said the SNP would be campaigning on their record.
We have a record of achievement in government upon which we’re proud to campaign — delivering the best healthcare anywhere in the UK, helping businesses to thrive and focusing above all on education and equipping our young people to achieve their very best in life.
The fact is you cannot trust the Tories — they’re cutting Scotland’s budget as it stands and gearing up to inflict more austerity and further hardship in the years ahead.
Corbyn is still speaking in Leamington Spa.
He asks who it can be read that parents are asked to give money to their children’s schools. Education must be properly funded.
He says his message to doctors and nurses and teachers in the public services is that they have had their pay frozen for too long. In practice they have had to put up with a pay cut, he says.
He says the government’s policies favour big corporations and the rich.
All Labour’s plans are fully funded, he says.
Jeremy Corbyn is speaking now at at event in Leamington Spa.
He says he spoke to nurses earlier today. They were the last cohort of nurses that were able to get a bursary to study. What sort of country charges people to train to be a nurse?
He says defending the NHS is a core Labour belief.
Labour will halt the sustainability and transformation plans, he says, to stop A&E closures.
Even bigger crowd for Corbyn in Leamington - across both sides of the road pic.twitter.com/S04oz0nOcT
— Rowena Mason (@rowenamason) May 8, 2017
Tories claim Vince Cable recording shows Lib Dems 'scheming' with Labour
No election is complete without someone being “secretly recorded”, and today the Tories have obliged; they have produced a recording of Sir Vince Cable, the Lib Dem former business secretary standing for re-election in Twickenham, and Sarah Olney, the Lib Dem candidate in Richmond West, admitting that the Lib Dems will work with other parties to defeat Tories.
Cable said that in some seats the Lib Dems might put up candidates without making an effort, to help a party like Labour. He described this as being “constructive”.
It’s not for me to give detailed descriptions [of how progressive parties could cooperate] – there is a spectrum of possibilities which will reflect the feelings of people locally. In some cases parties will put up candidates purely nominally, and they won’t try, or they’ll signal that they actually want someone else to win. In other cases candidates will stand down in a passive way and just go somewhere else. In other cases they will stand down and they will then endorse or have a common platform with other parties. I mean there’s a range of possibilities ...
I’ll just give one example – there’s Rupa Huq who’s the [Labour] candidate in Ealing I think. Purely by coincidence I found myself – I think it was on Any Questions or one of those programmes in Warwick a few months ago, and I gave her a lift home back to Ealing. We talked for a couple of hours, and it was very clear that on almost every issue our views were almost identical. And so I would find it difficult to vote against somebody like that, and I hope that our people around the country are discriminating and think and act in a constructive way.
And Olney said that the Lib Dems could help other progressive parties without necessarily withdrawing candidates. She explained:
Being tactical isn’t just about standing down or voting for the right candidate, it also can be about paper candidates, but not campaigning, and I think that can be just as powerful. Certainly I know that I’ve had a lot of Ealing Lib Dems coming down here and I’m sure they’ve been over in Twickenham as well, because yes, we may be standing candidates there, but we know that we want Rupa to win in Ealing, and so on and so forth.
The Conservative party have put out the quotes in a press released quoting Damian Green, the work and pensions secretary, saying: “The threat of Jeremy Corbyn making it to Downing Street propped up by a coalition of chaos is very real – and these recordings show the Lib Dems are scheming to make it happen.”
It’s all quite interesting, but not a huge surprise; Labour and the Lib Dems routinely operated unofficial non-aggression pacts in certain constituencies in the 1990s. And, as the Tories admit in their press release, Cable and Olney were speaking at an event titled “Let’s work together - pragmatism not tribalism”, which gives a fairly good insight into what they would be proposing.
Here is the ICM write-up of today’s poll from Martin Boon. And here are the tables (pdf).
Latest Guardian/ICM poll suggests Tories have record 22-point lead over Labour
The latest Guardian/ICM poll is out, and it suggests the Conservatives have a record 22-point lead over Labour. Here are the figures.
Conservatives: 49% (up 2 since Guardian/ICM last week)
Labour: 27% (down 1)
Lib Dems: 9% (up 1)
Ukip: 6% (down 2)
Greens: 3% (down 1)
Conservative lead: 22 points
Martin Boon, ICM’s director, says these poll ratings set a record with his organisation for a Conservative lead over Labour.
This poll is remarkable, and historic. It puts the Conservatives on 49%, and Labour on 27%, implying that 22-point lead. Not only is the lead an outright record for any ICM poll, but the Conservative share is a record in the Guardian/ICM series. It is only beaten by a 49.5% share that we recorded for the Sunday Mirror in May 1983, when ICM was called Marplan. Also noteworthy is the continued decline of Ukip, now measured at 6%, its lowest share from ICM since January 2013.
After last week’s local elections the BBC’s elections expert Prof John Curtice calculated that, if there had been elections in every ward in Britain and if people had voted the same way as they did on Thursday, the Conservatives would be on 38%, Labour 27%, the Lib Dems 18% and Ukip 5%.
These poll findings have Labour and Ukip on exactly or almost exactly the same share of the vote, but the Tories doing much better, and the Lib Dems much worse, than in the locals last week. To what extent that is a polling problem, and to what extent that just reflects different polling behaviour in different elections, is something that probably won’t become clear until after the general election.
UPDATE: Here is the ICM write-up of today’s poll from Martin Boon. And here are the tables (pdf).
Updated
My colleague Rowena Mason has been tweeting from the Jeremy Corbyn event in Worcester.
Huge crowd of Labour activists and members of public for Corbyn in Worcester, talking about mental health and social care pic.twitter.com/WWrC3klcex
— Rowena Mason (@rowenamason) May 8, 2017
One supporter was particularly enthusiastic.
"Oh my gosh it's like meeting the messiah" - this woman Janice was very very happy to meet Corbyn just now pic.twitter.com/W5jjffNqpQ
— Rowena Mason (@rowenamason) May 8, 2017
Jeremy Corbyn is addressing a huge crowd in the centre of Worcester, where supporters and the public are gathered. He is focussing on mental health, social care, and childhood obesity. Policies like free school meals and no hospital car parking charges are going down well.
Earlier he was asked if he was influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx, as John McDonnell said he was yesterday. Corbyn replied:
All great economists influence all of our thinking. Yes I have read some of Adam Smith, I have read some of Karl Marx, I have looked at the words of Ricardo, I have looked at many, many others.
I don’t consider myself the world’s greatest intellectual but you learnt from everybody, don’t close your mind to the thoughts of others - that way we’re all better informed.
What I can assure all the voters is this - that all of our proposals are fully funded, we’re not raising taxes for low and middle income people at all, in any respect.
We do have to properly fund our public services and I’m utterly determined to do that, and we do that by running the economy in a sensible way and that means an investment-led economy.
We have some of the lowest levels of investment of any of the manufacturing nations of this world.
On Theresa May’s migration target, he said:
Theresa May made that promise in 2010 and made the same promise in 2015, and didn’t get anywhere near it on any occasion at all.
Obviously our manifesto will set out our policy when that’s produced next week.
But the issue is that there has to be fair migration into this country and it has to be managed migration.
He dismissed Ukip’s “one in, one out” as a “totally unrealistic policy”.
I don’t think Ukip have given it any thought whatsoever.
Updated
May and Corbyn to appear on BBC Question Time leader special
Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn are not going to debate each other during the election campaign. But they will both be appearing on a BBC Question Time election programme, which may be the closest they come to a head-to-head encounter during the campaign. They won’t be on at the same time, but they will be taking questions from the same audience, one after the other, and so viewers will be able to compare them quite easily.
The BBC made the announcement as it published details about its election programming. Here are the main events it has announced.
Tomorrow: Theresa May and her husband Philip to be interviewed together on the One Show.
Wednesday 31 May: Mishal Husain to chair a seven-way debate with senior figures from the Conservatives, Labour, the SNP, the Lib Dems, Plaid Cymru, the Green and Ukip.
Friday 2 June: David Dimbleby to host a Question Time leader special with May and Corbyn facing audience questions consecutively.
Sunday 4 June: Dimbley to host a second Question Time leader special with Tim Farron and Nicola Sturgeon.
Andrew Neil will also be conducting a series of one-to-one interviews going out on BBC One at 7pm with May, Corbyn, Farron, Sturgeon and Paul Nuttall.
Updated
The Scottish council elections saw a very high turnout of 47%, significantly higher than the 39% seen five years ago, suggesting the June general election and the debate over Brexit galvanized voters.
The Electoral Management Board for Scotland, which represents the country’s returning officers, said that 1.93m voters took part in Thursday’s council elections, with 27.4% or 527,000 people, casting postal votes.
There were substantial anxieties that election fatigue could suppress turnout, after a heavy spate of elections and referendums. There has only been one year, 2013, in the past nine without an election or referendum in Scotland.
Of the 1.89m valid votes, the EMBS data showed that 610,454 (32.3%) first preference votes went to the Scottish National party; 478,073 (25.3%) to the Tories; 380,957 (20.2%) to Labour; 128,821 (6.8%) to the Lib Dems and 77,682 (4.1%) to the Scottish Greens. Independents, who make up the vast majority of council seats in the Western Isles, Orkney, Shetland and the Highlands, took 199,261 (13.7%) of the votes.
In 2012, when it took four months this data to be published, turnout had fallen to 39% after council elections were decoupled for the first time since devolution from elections for the Scottish parliament. In 2007, Scottish voters had to cast ballots for both the Holyrood and local council elections, so turnout for both was about 52.8%.
But voters were presented then for the first time with two competing systems of proportional representation: the classic single transferrable vote for councils and Holyrood’s additional member system, where there are 73 first past the post seats and 56 regional list seats.
That led to chaotic scenes with as many as 100,000 spoilt ballots and serious technical problems with new electronic counting machines. As a result, local council and Holyrood votes were ordered held in different years.
Updated
Theresa May's speech and Q&A - Summary and analysis
Here are the main points from the Theresa May event. She gave a short stump speech, not a proper scripted one, but it included a line about the French elections worth recording, as well as slightly new language about Jeremy Corbyn, plus the usual stuff about not taking victory for granted. She then took six questions from journalists. Tory officials are quite sensitive to the charge that she is avoiding scrutiny during the campaign, and six questions is rather generous by the standard of these events, although it is normal now for May to only take questions from media organisations chosen for her by her handlers in advance (ie, and not from the guy at the back from the Morning Start with his hand up). This is not what would happen at a proper, open press conference, although it is a strategy that Labour often adopts at its press events too.
As usual, the Q&A was interesting as much for the questions that May did not answer as for the ones that she did. Again, May is not particularly unusual in not always answering questions, although her predecessor, David Cameron, was more adept at concealing his evasiveness. Journalists at these campaign Q&As don’t normally get the chance to ask follow-ups, but hopefully the broadcasters who will get the chance to do lengthy interviews with her later in the campaign will be keeping a list of the questions she is dodging.
Here are the key points.
- May suggested she needed a large majority to be able to match the “strong mandate” secured by the new French president Emmanuel Macron. She said:
Yesterday a new French president was elected. He was elected with a strong mandate which he can take as a strong position in the negotiations. In the UK we need to ensure we’ve got an equally strong mandate and an equally strong negotiating position. And every vote for me and my team will strengthen my hand in those Brexit negotiations.
Macron got 66% of the vote in yesterday’s election. The Financial Times’ election polls tracker currently has the Conservatives at 47%, and Labour at 28%, and May’s comments could be seen as reflecting a desire for a landslide majority, even if (presumably?) she doesn’t expect to match Macron in vote share.
Her argument was also slightly disingenuous. The UK will be negotiating Brexit with the European commission, and then finalising it with the European council as a whole, and not with individual governments, and so in reality the strength or otherwise of Macron’s mandate is irrelevant.
- May asked voters to imagine Corbyn negotiating Brexit for the UK. She said in her stump speech.
And the alternative is to risk making Jeremy Corbyn prime minister. And, just imagine, try and picture him sitting at that negotiating table, with the collective might of the European commission and 27 other European countries against him.
She has attacked Corbyn’s supposed weak leadership repeatedly before, but today she conjured up the image of Corbyn going head to head with EU leaders to make her point.
- She refused to commit herself to being able to reduce annual net migration to under 100,000 by 2022. She confirmed that the Conservatives were keeping the target, but pointedly refused to answer a question about whether this target could be met by the end of the next parliament.
- She refused to commit to ending freedom of movement as soon as the UK leaves the EU. If the UK agrees a transitional period between Brexit and a new trade agreement coming into force, it is very likely that free movement will have to be part of that. May could be keeping this option open because, when asked if free movement would end as soon as the UK left, she refused to say yes. Instead she just said cryptically that:
Leaving the EU means that we won’t have free movement as it has been in the past.
- She refused to commit to ending the 1% cap on pay rises for NHS staff. Instead, when asked about a report saying some NHS staff are leaving to stack supermarket shelves instead because they are fed up about not getting proper pay rises, she said that half of NHS staff had had pay rises of 3 to 4% because of progression pay. She also said the NHS needed a strong economy.
- She signalled that she would fight any attempts by Macron to renegotiate the border deal between the UK and France that allows British police to operate in Calais. Asked about the Le Touquet border deal, which Macron said last month had to be “renegotiated”, she replied:
The Le Touquet agreement actually works for the benefit of both the UK and France ... [After 8 June] we will be sitting down and talking to Monsieur Macron and others about how that system has worked both for the benefit of France as well as for the benefit of the UK.
The Telegraph’s Christopher Hope wasn’t happy about this.
Theresa May says she will discuss Le Touquet agreement with new French president Emmanuel Macron. Surely it should be off the table? #GE2017
— Christopher Hope 📝 (@christopherhope) May 8, 2017
- She said she had no need to take part in TV debates because she was taking part in “debates up and down the country”. Asked by the Harrow Times why she was not taking part in election debates, she said it was:
because I’m taking part in debates up and down the country, taking questions from people, meeting people, getting out and about, and ensuring that I’m talking directly with voters and listening directly to voters.
Given that she is not taking part in any debates, she seems to have been using a rather idiosyncratic definition of the word, where most people would instead have said “conversations”.
Here is some reaction from journalists to the event.
From Sky’s Beth Rigby
May, in the most controlled election campaign I've ever seen, tells party they have to get out on streets. I've not seen her meet 1 voter
— Beth Rigby (@BethRigby) May 8, 2017
From the Guardian’s Anushka Asthana
May says she's not doing tv debates because she's doing debates around the country (she's addressing a room of tory candidates here)
— Anushka Asthana (@GuardianAnushka) May 8, 2017
From the Daily Mai’s Jason Groves
Theresa May urging people to vote 'for me and my team'. Not much mention of the word Conservatives...
— Jason Groves (@JasonGroves1) May 8, 2017
From the Telegraph’s Michael Deacon
Theresa May just said "Conservative Party" - then hastily corrected it to "me and my team"
— Michael Deacon (@MichaelPDeacon) May 8, 2017
Updated
Nigel Farage, the former Ukip leader, has accused Labour of copying one of its policies. Commenting on a Guardian tweet about Jeremy Corbyn’s announcement about abolishing hospital parking charges (see 11.07am), he posted this, referring to the fact the same idea was in Ukip’s 2015 manifesto (pdf).
Where have I heard this one before? https://t.co/A67lo1s37r
— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) May 8, 2017
The Institute of Directors has criticised Theresa May’s decision to keep the Conservatives’ target for getting annual net migration below 100,000. Stephen Martin, its director general, said in a statement:
A target is a poor substitute for a proper immigration policy. All parties should instead see Brexit as an opportunity to come up with a new system that is good for the economy, but also addresses voters’ concerns.
The next government must improve the education system so young people are ready to fill roles in developing industries, and workers of all ages can re-train as needed to find fulfilling jobs. This is the only sustainable way to reduce the demand for skills from abroad.
Here are some of the protesters outside the venue where Theresa May was speaking to Tory supporters and journalists.
Protestors outside May press conference challenge her to meet some 'real voters' #ge2017 pic.twitter.com/yO9Xh82TRw
— norman smith (@BBCNormanS) May 8, 2017
Ukip calls for net migration to be reduced to zero over five years
Ukip have launched their immigration policy for the election, and it’s a pledge to reduce net migration to zero over a five-year period, with no exceptions made for student numbers.
Introduced in London by the party leader, Paul Nuttall, and their immigration spokesman, John Bickley, it would involve a points-style system for entry, and compulsory work visas for people from all overseas nations other than the Republic of Ireland, because of its open border with Northern Ireland.
The one other exception would be a time-limited system of six-month seasonal visas for agricultural workers, with the idea that these would be phased out once enough UK staff could be found to fill the role.
Introducing it as a “policy of balanced migration”, Nuttall said it was one area in which Ukip hoped to establish “clear water between us and the establishment parties” - principally the Conservatives.
The Tories had “broken their promises on this time and time again”, Nuttall said, arguing that Theresa May’s record as home secretary showed she could not be trusted to meet her pledge to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands.
Nuttall said Ukip’s plan would meet objections from “corporate vested interests”. It might well also find doubters among universities, which have warned that including overseas students in reduced targets could badly hit an economically valuable sector.
Farmers’ groups might also worry about the idea of eventually losing all access to overseas workers, having issued warnings about existing labour shortages.
Nuttall also addressed Ukip’s abysmal local election results, saying the imminent general election had made them “doubly difficult”. He said:
We knew that these local election results were going to be difficult. We knew that they were going to be the most difficult set of elections we were going to fight.
But he dismissed Nigel Farage’s warning yesterday that a successful Brexit could spell the end of Ukip, saying there was “no chance” May would deliver fully on both leaving the EU and immigration.
In a slightly eye-catching moment, Bickley said that given its lack of MPs, “I would say currently we’re the most successful party in the world, for actually forcing a government to do our bidding”.
Asked if he agreed, Nuttall was only slightly more modest:
We have been, in terms of driving the government into the position it is now on Brexit, the most influential party of the 20th century in this country. [He meant to say 21th century]
Jeremy Corbyn is speaking to NHS staff in Worcester now.
He says Labour wants to lift the cap on pay rises for NHS staff.
He highlights the Labour plans announced today to ban adverts for junk food on prime time TV.
And tells the nurses that Labour would end hospital car parking charges, which he says are “crippling” for some staff. (See 11.07am.)
And he says his aunt joined the NHS as a nurse soon after it was set up. She ended up a hospital matron, he says.
This is from the Press Association’s Arj Singh.
Jeremy Corbyn is meeting student nurses - and their practice dummy - as he announced plans to scrap hospital parking charges in England pic.twitter.com/U5wDqizBWf
— Arj Singh (@singharj) May 8, 2017
My colleague Alan Travis compares where Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn have chosen to campaign this morning.
Theresa May in Labour-held Harrow West (18th on Tory hitlist) today while Jeremy Corbyn in West Mids and Leamington Spa (68th Lab hitlist)
— Alan Travis (@alantravis40) May 8, 2017
Labour says it would end NHS car parking charges
The Labour party has just announced that it will end hospital car parking charges if it wins the election.
Here is an extract from its news release.
The next Labour government will make parking at NHS England hospitals free for patients, visitors and NHS staff. Labour created the NHS to be free at the point of use, so the next Labour government will eradicate the hidden charges of car parking charges.
Labour will increase the rate of insurance premium tax to 20% for private healthcare insurance products to fund the policy, replacing the £162m England’s underfunded hospitals currently raise from car parking charges by scrapping the subsidy for people that can afford it, rather than charging people who can’t.
Last month, a Freedom of Information request by Unison revealed some hospitals are charging staff, including nurses struggling with low wages, nearly £100 a month to park, resulting in reports of nurses having to rush out in between appointments to move their cars and avoid fines.
All of Labour’s new spending commitments are fully costed and transparent. This policy will be paid for by a new charge on private healthcare insurance.
And here is a comment from Jeremy Corbyn on the plan.
Labour will end hospital parking charges, which place an unfair and unnecessary burden on families, patients and NHS staff. Hospital parking charges are a tax on serious illnesses.
Our hospitals are struggling from under-funding at the hands of Theresa May’s Conservative government, but the gap should not be filled by charging sick patients, anxious relatives and already hard-pressed NHS staff for an essential service
Our NHS needs a Labour government that will stand up for the many, not the few.
May refuses to say that net migration can be reduced to below 100,000 by 2022
Q: Can you just clarify that you will stick with the target of getting net migration below 100,000? And do you think you can hit it by 2022?
May says she has been very clear that net migration should be sustainable, and that that means it should be below 100,000.
- May refuses to say that net migration can be reduced to below 100,000 by 2022.
And that’s it. The Q&A is over.
(Or Q&NA, in some cases.)
I will post a summary soon.
Q: Will you commit to ending the 1% cap on pay rises for nurses?
May says some nurses have had higher pay rises because of progression pay.
Q: Do you think the election of Emmanuel Macron will lead to the renegotiation of the Le Touquet agreement.
May says the election of Macron shows why the UK needs someone tough in the Brexit talks.
She says the Le Toquet agreement works for both France and Britain.
May's Q&A
Theresa May is now taking questions.
Q: [From the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg] You say you are developing credible policies. But why are you sticking to an immigration target you keep missing? And will free movement end after Brexit?
May says the net migration figures did go down. But then they went up again.
She says it is important to think of why a target is needed. It is because of the impact net migration has on people and on public services.
She wants to get it down to sustainable levels. That means tens of thousands, she says.
She says after we leave the EU we won’t have free movement as we had in the past.
Jeremy Corbyn just wants to carry on with free movement as it has been.
- May confirms that the Tories remain committed to getting net migration below 100,000.
- She sidesteps a question about whether free movement will end after Brexit. There is speculation that, as part of a transition deal, it will have to continue for some years. May just says it won’t continue as in the past.
Updated
And May repeats her claim that the Tories cannot take victory for granted.
How many times over the past few years have the polls got it wrong? They got the 2015 election wrong. They got the EU referendum wrong.
And Jeremy Corbyn was a 200-1 outsider to be Labour leader.
May mocks the notion of Jeremy Corbyn sitting at the table for the Brexit negotiations.
(I will post the full quote later.)
May says Tory campaigners must 'leave no stone unturned, no door un-knocked on'
Here is an extract from the speech released in advance.
A vote for me and my team is a vote to secure strong and stable leadership through Brexit and beyond.
A vote for me and my team will strengthen my hand in the Brexit negotiations.
A vote for me and my team will lock in economic security for our whole country.
The alternative is to risk making Jeremy Corbyn our prime minister ...
We must take nothing for granted, leave no stone unturned, no door un-knocked on.
It is only by working flat-out, every day, from now to 8 June that we can gain the trust of the British people and earn their support on polling day.
Theresa May's speech
Theresa May is speaking at at event in Harrow.
The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg has tweeted these from the event.
Just in case you hadn't noticed, CCHQ seems to reckon brand May stronger than brand Tory pic.twitter.com/xD3aKDQFK4
— Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak) May 8, 2017
May event this morning is with the tories candidates for London and the South East - all obediently leap to their feet when PM arrives
— Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak) May 8, 2017
It sounds like a scene from one of John Crace’s Kim Jong-May sketches.
Two years ago, when Jeremy Corbyn was first running for the Labour leader, the tax campaigner Richard Murphy was identified as the brains behind “Corbynomics”. Murphy actively campaigned for Corbyn and was credited with coming up with proposals for “people’s QE (quantitative easing), an ambitious plan to use QE to fund infrastructure investment.
This morning Murphy was on the Today programme. But he is no longer a Corbyn economics guru, and he was on the programme expressing reservations about John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor’s, announcement of his plan to raise tax for those earning more than £80,000. Murphy was not critical of the plan per se, but he argued that McDonnell was not being sufficiently ambitious, and that McDonnell was too worried about the need to balance the books on the current account. Murphy said:
We are talking about a handful of billions of pounds. It could be £5bn. It may be less. I’ve seen those estimates. I doubt if it’s very much more than that. In other words, taxing income tax on those earning more than £80,000 a year, by an extra 5% say, will not make a big difference to the overall balance of the government’s books.
It does make a difference, a powerful difference, to the signals on inequality, and I think that’s important. But it doesn’t solve [McDonnell’s] underlying economic problems and it doesn’t help his commitment to actually beat austerity, pay people what they deserve and so on. In other words, this policy constrains everything else he can do ...
McDonnell should have been talking about he was going to do to deal with the real issues that are facing the economy, the lack of investment, low pay, the lack of really good employment prospects for young people. All the comes from investment. He should have been talking about how he was going to fund that, and at the same time making clear that he was not going to be charging the same people who are going to get opportunity from that to pay for it. But he hasn’t said that. So it’s a political mistake to do it in this order.
Murphy set out his argument in more detail in a post on his blog yesterday. In it he argued that McDonnell was “just not leftwing enough to do the right thing for Labour”. Here’s an extract.
Labour is not making an economic case for a post Brexit era.
So it’s not saying that after Brexit Labour could require that 20% of all pension contributions be invested in UK job and wealth creating programmes as a condition of the tax relief that they enjoy. The last time I looked that would raise $16 billion a year for housing, green and innovation investment in the UK.
Nor is it saying that Labour could use QE to buy out ruinous PFI schemes, but I have no idea why not.
And it’s not saying that Labour could, after Brexit, offer a national savings ISA that would invest in the UK, paying 2% per annum tax free to £5,000 of interest a year. Sure that’s more than the cost of government borrowing, but after inflation it’s a net zero cost to the government and the best savings product on the market. This would see money pour in. And what could it be used for? Start with social housing and the Green New Deal plus a dedicated transport fund. It also provides regional investment funds for each devolved government and region – and people can direct their money to the area they want. Think that what that could do. Pension saving would also be allowed in this fund. Cash would be liberated for the future investing in what we need now.
Updated
The Lib Dems have also criticised the Tories’ decision to keep the target of getting annual net migration below 100,000. This is from Brian Paddick, their home affairs spokesman.
[Theresa] May seems to have forgotten everything she learnt in the Home Office – you cannot have a successful economy if you restrict immigration that much. It seems like the Conservatives are intent on harming our economy, first with a hard Brexit that will yank us out of the single market and cost jobs, and now this.
The Brexiteers told us that leaving the EU would mean we could be more generous to our Commonwealth partners, it is now clear that this way another leave lie.
The two main unionist parties in Northern Ireland have failed to form a comprehensive electoral pact, it emerged today.
The Democratic Unionist and Ulster Unionist parties have confirmed they will co-operate in the Fermanagh/South Tyrone and North Belfast constituencies.
However, they have not secured a deal to establish a single unionist candidate for South Belfast and East Belfast.
In a joint statement DUP leader Arlene Foster and UUP chief Robert Swann called for “the strongest vote for pro union candidates.”
Foster and Swann said they were still committed to “better unionist co-operation” but have concluded any formal pact arrangement for the snap general election.
The DUP meanwhile has now selected barrister Emma Little-Pengelly to run in South Belfast. She will challenge the sitting MP Alasdair McDonnell of the nationalist SDLP.
The onus is now on the UUP to decide if they will run a separate candidate which would effectively split the unionist vote in South Belfast.
Ryan Shorthouse, who runs Bright Blue, the thinktank promoting liberal conservatism, has said it is a mistake for the Tories to keep the target of getting annual net migration below 100,000.
Keeping net mig target a mistake. Controlling migration need & should not be centred on an arbitrary, indiscriminate & unrealistic figure
— Ryan Shorthouse (@RyanShorthouse) May 8, 2017
On the subject of progressive alliances (see 7.54am), the National Health Action party says that at a meeting on Saturday in South West Surrey, where the health secretary Jeremy Hunt is the Conservative candidate, Lib Dem, Labour and Green supporters agreed that they would support the NHA party candidate, Dr Louise Irvine.
Irvine stood in 2015 in the seat and came fourth, behind Ukip and Labour. Hunt won with a majority of 28,556, and 60% of the vote.
The Greens are standing aside to help Irvine. The Labour party and the Lib Dems are putting up candidates against her, but some of their activists are expected to be campaigning for Irvine instead of for their own party’s candidate. This morning the Today programme quoted Steve Williams, a member of the local Labour party’s executive committee, saying he thought the majority of local Labour party members would be backing the NHA party candidate.
In a press notice the NHA party said it hoped Irvine could follow in the footsteps of the party’s co-founder, the doctor Richard Taylor, who was elected independent MP for Wyre Forest in 2001 on the back of a campaign to restore the A&E department at Kidderminster Hospital.
Updated
It’s not always easy to find something to report on the Lib Dem battlebus, but nothing escapes Sky News. They have posted some video footage of Tim Farron stumbling (although you have to watch quite closely, because it’s in the background.)
Blink and you'll miss it. We managed to capture Tim Farron's little slip on the Liberal Democrat campaign bus live on air this morning pic.twitter.com/WfDOXfQnXy
— Sky News (@SkyNews) May 8, 2017
The Conservative party has had getting annual net migration below 100,000 in its last two manifestos and yet the government for most of the last seven years it has been missing it by a factor of three. Many people would cite that as a good reason for dropping the target and replacing it with something more realistic. But on Radio 4’s Westminster House last night Stephen Crabb, the Conservative former work and pensions secretary, put forward a novel argument for keeping it; he effectively said it was worth having precisely because it was so ambitious. He told the programme:
Having a target like that is really important for being clear with the electorate about where our direction is, what we want to achieve and being ambitious ....
My own concern is that we’ve known for quite some time that reaching that target with immigration is extremely difficult if not possible. Nevertheless, holding that out there, showing the electorate that that is the destination we want to get to, is in line with what they want on the doorsteps but getting there is going to be very very tough.
On the Today programme this morning the Conservative Nadhim Zahawi, who is seeking re-election as MP for Stratford-upon-Avon, put forward a version of the same argument. He said:
If you move away from targets then you are essentially telling the organisation that you don’t really care and I tell you one thing, Theresa May absolutely cares about making sure that our immigration is sustainable for this country and delivers for all those people who wanted to take back control of our borders.
Theresa May is not interested in sort of fiddling the figures or spinning the figures for a day or two. She is serious about wanting to meet these targets.
Updated
Gove says May is leading a 'gentle counter-revolution'
Theresa May is leading a “gentle counter-revolution” of people who feel overlooked, according to her one-time leadership rival Michael Gove.
Interviewed on the Cambridge University podcast Talking Politics, Gove said:
One of the reasons that Theresa May has done so well politically, is that she articulates a sense that for those people who have felt overlooked because they don’t have the connections or the capital to influence what happens in Westminster, she is their champion. In that sense the Brexit vote and the support for the Conservatives since then has been a very mild and gentle counter-revolution. And it is a counter-revolution that has put Theresa at its head.
Asked about his notorious comment during the referendum campaign that people “have had enough of experts,” Gove said:
One of the reason why my words had a resonance ... is that they spoke to a feeling that voters appeared to feel that they had been patronised and elites in some cases felt that their leadership was not respected in the way that it had been perhaps a generation ago.
Gove, a leading leave campaigner, conceded that experts were needed especially in the Brexit negotiations. He said:
We need expertise in the details of trade negotiations, we need technical diplomatic expertise in understanding what different countries within the European countries want. We need expertise in emotional intelligence in understanding how you can start a negotiation even when people are variously either hurt or angered, and bring them to an understanding of what might be in people’s common interest.
Even though we definitely need expertise, which is either technical economics or human psychology, I think we also need to recognise that one of the feelings of the moment is a sense among the public that some votes and some voices appear to matter more than others.
Good morning. I’m taking over from Claire.
Tim Farron, the Lib Dem leader, is launching his battlebus tour today and he is saying employers should monitor the ethnic diversity of their workforce more effectively. The Lib Dems are saying the Equality Act’s requirement for collecting data on the level of female employment and the gender pay gap should be extended to ethnic minorities. This would apply to firms with more than 250 staff.
Farron said:
It is shocking that in 21st century Britain inequality that comes down to race still persists. Sunlight is always the best disinfectant and by bringing these gaps out into the open we can start to address the issue and speed up progress to create a more equal and fair workplace.
Jo Swinson, the Lib Dem former equalities minister, said:
The gender pay gap, and the drive to close it, is now recognised as an issue that government needed to intervene in to get positive change but other inequalities still persist in the workplace.
It is clear that an ethnicity pay gap does exist but whilst organisations are allowed to get away with keeping patchy records the truth is we’ll never know the full extent of the gap.
Swinson is standing in East Dunbartonshire, where she lost her seat to the SNP in 2015, and Farron will be campaigning there with her later today.
Time for me to hand over to Andrew Sparrow, who will steer you through the rest of the political day.
Time, too, for a quick reminder: if you’d like the Snap, our election briefing email, delivered to your inbox each morning, do sign up here.
Ashworth rules out Labour progressive alliance with Greens
Jon Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, follows on the Today heels of Caroline Lucas. He’s there to talk about Labour’s policy of the day, which is banning junk food ads on all programmes before the 9pm watershed.
(You can read our full story on that policy here.)
But Ashworth was also asked whether he agreed with Lucas on the benefits of a progressive alliance. He wasn’t vague:
No.
Labour is a national party, he says, and everyone needs to have the opportunity to vote for a Labour candidate.
Politicians who try to do these backroom deals never, ever come out of it well …
The British people are always correct in the end.
Updated
Lucas urges Corbyn to let local Labour parties form anti-Tory pacts with Greens
Caroline Lucas, co-leader of the Green party, has been talking to the BBC Today programme about the (slim) chances of a progressive alliance. With Jeremy Corbyn and Tim Farron having rejected the Green offer on a national scale, she says, something else is going on in some constituencies:
What we’re talking about is a whole series of different electoral alliances, not one big pact…
The starting point is that we have an archaic and broken electoral system.
The upcoming Conservative landslide is likely, Lucas says, to be “made even worse by first past the post”:
In a handful of marginal constituencies, we might be able to come to some arrangement … crucially to push for some change to our electoral system.
Lucas cites results in the south-east of England in 2015, when, she says, the Tories won 51% of votes, securing 93% of the seats. She says this is “scandalous”. The Greens won over 1 million votes in the UK in the same election, she says: “We could have had 24 Green MPs.”
With Greens having stepped aside in Ealing, Acton and Brighton Kemptown, Lucas wants to see Labour and the Lib Dems back the Greens on the Isle of Wight:
We are clearly the second party – we have a chance of getting rid of a Tory.
For this to happen we need Jeremy Corbyn to get around a table with us and I think what is so disappointing is that he talks about doing politics differently and yet he is betraying the mass of the people that he says he represents by allowing them to be hit hardest by a massive Tory majority.
We’ve still got a few more days where we could build on these alliances, which it isn’t just the Green party asking for them, it is people up and down the country begging parties of the left and the centre-left to get together to do grown up politics and to be able to put in place a group of people who have a better chance of serving the interests of the people rather than allowing a massive Tory landslide, which is what we are on course to see.
Lucas says that many people will wake up on 9 June asking:
When will the left ever learn?
Updated
Theresa May was one of the first world leaders to congratulate Emmanuel Macron on his victory in the French presidential election, with Downing Street pinging out a statement as soon as the exit polls confirmed his win:
The prime minister warmly congratulates president-elect Macron on his election success. France is one of our closest allies and we look forward to working with the new president on a wide range of shared priorities.
Other party leaders followed suit:
Congratulations to @EmmanuelMacron on your victory in #Presidentielle2017. I look forward to working with you.
— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) May 7, 2017
Vive La France. Congratulations to new President, Emmanuel Macron on his decisive victory over the hard right. #frenchelection
— Nicola Sturgeon (@NicolaSturgeon) May 7, 2017
Congratulations to Emmanuel Macron. This is not just a victory for France, but a victory for Britain and the liberal values we hold dear
— Tim Farron (@timfarron) May 7, 2017
Diolch o galon/deep gratitude to ppl in France for rejecting the #FarRight. We must defeat their divisive, hateful politics in all countries
— LeanneWood (@LeanneWood) May 7, 2017
The Green party said:
Far right beaten in Austria, Netherlands and, now, France. Fascism isn’t inevitable. We can and must stand up to this evil.
I haven’t spotted anything official yet from Ukip or Paul Nuttall. Do please let me know @Claire_Phipps if you see their response.
Nigel Farage was not impressed:
'@EmmanuelMacron offers 5 more years of failure, power to the EU and open borders. If @MLP_officiel sticks in there, she can win in 2022.
— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) May 7, 2017
Facebook has announced moves to help suppress fake news during the UK general election, starting with the deletion of tens of thousands of bogus profiles.
The US social media company, which has more than 31 million accounts registered in Britain, is also launching a fact-checking initiative and said it will stop promoting posts that show signs of being implausible. From Monday it is also running newspaper adverts that give 10 tips on spotting fake news.
They advise that “if shocking claims in the headline sound unbelievable they probably are”, to “check the author’s sources to confirm they are accurate” and “only share news that you know to be credible”.
The company also announced it was supporting Full Fact, a UK fact checking charity, “to work with major newsrooms to address rumours and misinformation spreading online during the UK general election”.
Full Fact has so far raised £28,000 in a crowdfunding exercise to fact-check the UK election campaign. It is unclear how big the financial contribution will be from Facebook and Google, which is also providing backing. The charity already checks major claims by political parties, newspapers and political manifestos and is now expected to extend further into social media. Its staff of 11 will double for the election campaign with researchers from the House of Commons library and the Office of National Statistics joining on secondment.
Tories 'to stick with target of getting net migration below 100,000'
The Conservative manifesto in 2010 and 2015 offered the promise – well, to be fair, in 2015, it was an “ambition” – to reduce net migration to “the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands”.
It’s a pledge that has never been met.
Now the BBC reports – and it’s certainly been strongly hinted at over the last couple of weeks – that the 2017 Conservative manifesto will retain the policy.
Norman Smith, the BBC’s assistant political editor, says the vagueness expressed by home secretary Amber Rudd on the migration target yesterday (“We are having a new manifesto – it’s not going to be identical to the last one”) has been met with “unequivocal counter-briefing”.
The target, despite remaining elusive to the point of implausibility, is of course closely associated with Theresa May and her home office tenure. With a possible abandonment of other key policies – triple-locks on pensions and taxes, for example – leaving the “tens of thousands” target behind might be a desertion too far.
Updated
The Snap: your election briefing
Good morning and welcome to the election campaign live blog, with precisely one month to go until we find out what it was all for.
I’m Claire Phipps with the morning briefing and the early political news. Andrew Sparrow will be along later. Join us in the comments below or find me on Twitter @Claire_Phipps. You can also sign up to have this briefing sent straight to you via email over here.
What’s happening?
While British politics has – with a few overwrought exceptions – welcomed the victory of Emmanuel Macron over Marine Le Pen in France’s presidential election, it’s also not averse to exploiting the “but what about meeeee?” card.
Sure, Macron doesn’t seem minded to smooth the UK’s path out of the EU – he’s called Brexit a “crime” – but wishing demagogic nationalism on France in order to make the divorce a fraction less painful for Britain might be taking patriotic self-interest a teensy bit far.
Sunday saw Tory ministers Amber Rudd and Jeremy Hunt continue to poke the EU with direct accusations that Brussels was attempting to meddle in the election with leaked reports of that awkward dinner at Downing Street. (An account that has now been talked about more times by the “bloody difficult” Theresa May and co than by anyone else, it now feels.) As pro-remain Conservative Anna Soubry put it:
It’s like those boxers, they do all that stuff before they actually get in the ring. Honestly, I think this is just a bit of puff and we are in a general election.
So we are. Which surely means proper, costed policies soon – if not just yet. “You’ll have to wait for the manifesto” is, for those of us watching the daily bouts of political interviews, surely rivalling “strong and stable” as the Tory party slogan of choice. Rudd, the home secretary, employed the tactical shrug yesterday when pressed on whether the 2010 and 2015 commitment to reducing net migration to “tens of thousands” would get another runout in 2017; the BBC reports this morning that the never-met pledge will indeed be dusted off for a third-time-lucky go.
Blasts from the past abound this morning, with the admission by Tim Farron that as a boy he had a poster of Margaret Thatcher on his bedroom wall:
I had all sort of kind of weird icons that I was into. I had pictures of strange sort of left-wing politicians. I remember I had a Mrs Thatcher picture. I had a John F Kennedy picture. I had a Jo Grimond picture.
No word on John McDonnell’s teenage bedroom but the shadow chancellor – presumably buoyed by the reaction to his flourishing of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book in the Commons in 2015 – yesterday added another classic to the summer re-reading list. “I believe there is a lot to learn from reading Das Kapital, yes, of course there is,” he told the BBC, adding:
I’m going to be the first socialist [chancellor] in the tradition of the Labour party.
What this means, in policy terms, is a new tax bracket affecting those earning over £80,000. Taking bets now on what features most in coverage of this: that 95% of people earn less than £80,000; or photoshopped McDonnells with Karl Marx beards.
And last in today’s nostalgia roundup: Ukip, which its former leader admitted might soon be redundant (along with all its MEPs). True, Nigel Farage issued this warning of imminent obsolescence from the comfort of an ITV sofa. A point underlined in a complaint by the Green party to the BBC, according to a Mirror report, which queries why a party with its own MP and which won 40 seats in last week’s local elections gets rather less attention than a party with zero MPs that clung on to just one local councillor. Meanwhile, Ukip leader Paul Nuttall will pledge a “one in, one out” net immigration policy, something that also amounts, literally, to zero.
At a glance:
- Labour would ban junk food adverts during TV popular with children.
- Banksy Brexit mural of man chipping away at EU flag appears in Dover.
- NHS staff ‘quitting to work in supermarkets because of poor pay’.
- Theresa May to pledge ‘mental health revolution’.
Poll position
Plenty of weekend polling to catch up on. ICM for the Sun on Sunday pegged the Tory lead at 18 points, with May’s party down one to 46% and Labour level on 28%. YouGov for the Sunday Times also had Labour on 28%, but the Conservatives on 47%, a six-point legup on its poll last week. ORB for the Sunday Telegraph bumps Labour into the thirties: on 31% versus the Tories’ 46%. The Observer’s Opinium poll keeps them there, with 30% against the Conservatives’ 46% (down a point on the week before). Across all of them, the Lib Dems pootle in with between 9% and 11%.
Diary
- At 9.30 in London, Paul Nuttall hosts a policy launch/reminder that Ukip is still here.
- Theresa May meets Conservative candidates in north-west London from 10.30am.
- Labour continues its health kick with Jeremy Corbyn meeting nursing students in the West Midlands.
- Ruth Davidson launches the Scottish Conservatives’ election campaign in Edinburgh with a vow to bring SNP “back down to size”.
- Meanwhile Nicola Sturgeon campaigns in Perth from 10am.
-
Tim Farron is in Scotland too, lending a hand to Jo Swinson’s attempt to regain East Dunbartonshire from 11am. Later he’s in St Andrews and Edinburgh.
- From 5pm, Caroline Lucas continues the push to turn the Isle of Wight green with student Esther Poucher, who prompted Tory incumbent Andrew Turner to step aside after he told her “homosexuality is wrong”.
- At 8pm, Farron is back, in the first of the ITV leaders’ interviews.
Read these
Iain Dale, LBC presenter and conservative commentator, blogs here about his seat-by-seat predictions for the general election:
The main assumption is that the Ukip vote is going to reduce dramatically. We don’t yet know how many seats Ukip is actually going to put up candidates in. The ITV Wales YouGov poll showed that 64% of the Ukip vote will transfer directly to the Conservatives, and only 2% to Labour. In many Labour-held marginals it would only take 25-40% of the Ukip vote to go to the Conservative candidate for him/her to win. If there is no Ukip candidate in a Labour marginal, some very bizarre seats could end up going to the Conservatives – there may be one or two with five-figures majorities which fall …
Ukip certainly won’t be represented in the next parliament, but the Greens could win a second seat in Bristol West. I realise most people will think I’ve lost my senses by predicting this, but I think it’s entirely possible.
If you didn’t catch it in the Observer yesterday, it’s worth settling down today with Carole Cadwalladr’s deep dive into Brexit, big data and voter manipulation:
We, the British people, were played. In his blog, Dominic Cummings writes that Brexit came down to ‘about 600,000 people – just over 1% of registered voters’. It’s not a stretch to believe that a member of the global 1% found a way to influence this crucial 1% of British voters. The referendum was an open goal too tempting a target for US billionaires not to take a clear shot at. Or I should say US billionaires and other interested parties, because in acknowledging the transatlantic links that bind Britain and America, Brexit and Trump, so tightly, we also must acknowledge that Russia is wrapped somewhere in this tight embrace too…
The Electoral Commission is powerless. And another election, with these same rules, is just a month away.
Revelation of the day
Expect strong and stable sofa chat this week when the PM lolls on the One Show couch with her husband, Philip May, for their first joint TV interview. “The 59-year-old has been content to stand behind his wife as she takes on the burden of running the country,” the Daily Mail points out stoically, as though it might be the normal state of affairs for someone to do their spouse’s job.
The day in a tweet
And you thought – after Thatcher and Marx – that politics couldn’t get any more retro today:
A very enjoyable visit to the Try Cycle event organised by @TryTwickenham. Its not everyday that you get the chance to ride a penny farthing pic.twitter.com/s5kEGPLFz5
— Vince Cable (@vincecable) May 7, 2017
And another thing
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