Afternoon summary
Here’s a quick afternoon summary of today’s events.
- Jeremy Corbyn declined to disclose the source of documents used as evidence that the NHS would be “on the table” in a post-Brexit UK/US trade deal, after Reddit warned of a link to a Russian interference campaign. The forum issued a statement on Friday night saying that the documents had been posted on their site in late October. “We investigated this account and the accounts connected to it and today we believe this was part of a campaign that has been reported as originating from Russia,” it said. The Labour leader today declined to respond to a question of where Labour obtained the documents from:
We obtained those documents. We believed those documents to be correct and nobody until yesterday denied the correctness of those documents. The issue is there should be no interference in British politics by anybody else.
- The father of a man killed in the London Bridge attack has accused Boris Johnson of lying and making “political capital” from his son’s death during the BBC leaders’ debate. David Merritt – whose son Jack was stabbed to death by convicted terrorist Usman Khan – called the prime minister a fraud following his appearance on Friday night’s TV debate, six days before polling day. “Johnson lied and used our son’s death to make political capital,” Merritt said in a thread posted on Twitter on Saturday.
- The Conservatives are investigating three parliamentary candidates over antisemitism and are facing calls to suspend them before the election.
– Sally-Ann Hart, standing in the Tory marginal seat of Hastings, shared a video with an image implying that the billionaire George Soros, who is Jewish, controls the EU, and she also liked a Nazi slogan on Facebook.
– Lee Anderson, standing for the Conservatives in Labour-held Ashfield, is an active member of Ashfield Backs Boris, a Facebook group where Soros conspiracy theories have been promoted and which includes supporters of the far-right activist Tommy Robinson.
– Richard Short, the candidate for St Helens South and Whiston, is being investigated for asking whether a Jewish journalist was more loyal to Israel than to Britain.
- The Labour party has pledged to electrify England’s entire bus fleet by 2030, promising to bring services “into the future”. Jeremy Corbyn said “the Westminster bubble” didn’t care about buses, despite the fact that so many people rely on them. He said the Conservatives had overseen the cancellation or reduction of 3,000 routes across the country leaving people “isolated and stuck at home”. His party plans to electrify all of England’s 35,000 buses by 2030, reducing their emissions by 72%, and fund a reverse in the cuts to services as well as creating new ones.
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Boris Johnson was asked about the case of serial rapist Joseph McCann, after the probation service apologised for “failings” that enabled him to carry out a series of attacks on women and children.
Asked whether anyone in government should take responsibility, he said:
I think it’s an absolutely appalling case and shows that there is something very wrong and what we’re going to do is, what I’ve said for a long, long time, is that we want to review the way sentencing takes place and the way sentences are served. And at the moment, the automatic early release at the halfway point for serious sexual and violent offenders is totally wrong, and I said that back in August, and we’re going to stop that.
We have a bill ready to go, in parliament, if we can get a working majority on Thursday, we will not only get Brexit done, we will get other things done, including that.
(Here is some useful analysis by the Guardian’s home affairs correspondent Jamie Grierson, arguing that the key issue in the McCann case is not actually his initial sentence but its management.)
Johnson repeated that he thought terrorists should have to serve their full sentences, following from the London Bridge attack last Friday.
I also think that, as I’ve said, the terrorists will serve their full sentence but when it comes to this individual case we have to look at exactly what happened and we have to make sure we do not have a continual habit of early release for really serious sexual and violent offenders.
That doesn’t mean you can’t have rehabilitation, it doesn’t mean you can’t do things to ensure you keep people out of prison. You can do all sorts of things to work with young people to get their lives back on track, but when someone commits a serious sexual or violent offence they should not be released early.
Such comments today provoked more furious criticism from David Merritt – whose son Jack was killed in the attack – who used a thread on Twitter to say the prime minister “used our son’s death to make political capital”.
You can read the full story here:
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While we’re on the topic – Johnson has been asked again about the parliamentary committee report on potential Russian interference in the EU referendum and the 2017 general election, which he has refused to publish.
Well I can repeat what I’ve already said about this, many times, which is that, I know of no evidence of any successful interference by Russia in any democratic event in this country and on the report, we (are) obviously just complying with the normal timetable for releasing such things and I saw no reason to release it earlier just because there was an election going on.
Corbyn is speaking about the leaked document on US trade talks, which he says shows the US would demand access to the health market in Britain and access to our public services.
He says that the Conservatives are now saying those documents aren’t real. (The Conservative line is actually that the documents don’t show what Labour says they do, not that they are not real.)
Corbyn says:
A week later they claim that somebody else wrote these documents. Well, it seems a very strange turn of events that, first of all, you get a refusal to publish the documents – so you get the redacted version, which did confirm that all the meetings had taken place. Then you get the American version, which shows they did take place. Then you get the version which was given to me, which I produced for the public interest, which suddenly, this morning, is apparently an invention by somebody else.
I tell you what it’s in their imagination. They are up to their dirty tricks with our NHS, our services, our lives and our market in the future.
No Labour government will ever sell our National Health Service. It is simply not for sale.
Just to be clear, the suggestion is that the documents were first posted on Reddit by an account which was part of a campaign directed by Moscow.
Here’s Reddit’s statement from last night: “We were recently made aware of a post on Reddit that included leaked documents from the UK. We investigated this account and the accounts connected to it and today we believe this was part of a campaign that has been reported as originating from Russia.”
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Jeremy Corbyn says he was proud to go to Iain Duncan Smith’s constituency of Chingford and Woodford Green and say that a Labour government would scrap universal credit. He says we need “a real living wage” for all workers, including young workers.
On the NHS, Corbyn says that Johnson seemed annoyed yesterday when he mentioned that the Conservatives voted against its creation 41 times.
“The Welsh Labor government has been grotesquely underfunded by the Westminster government,” says Corbyn. It would be so much better with a Labour government in Westminster working with a Labour government in Wales, he says.
On the issue of compensating the Waspi women, he says the media often ask him how he can afford the policy. “Well I’m sorry, it’s a moral responsibility,” says Corbyn.
He says Michael Gove doesn’t like him very much. There are boos from the crowd. “It’s ok, it’s ok. They don’t call me marmite for nothing,” says Corbyn.
He talks about Labour’s plans for a “green revolution”. “You cannot go on watching species being extinct and forests burned in Latin America and West Africa,” he says. He says he wants a Labour government to host COP26 and “to go further and faster then Paris envisaged”. “At the current rate we won’t reach emissions targets until 2099,” he says.
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Jeremy Corbyn is talking at an event in Swansea. He’s talking about the linking of music and art with socialist ideas to “create the kind of society we want to create”. He pays tribute to his favourite poet, Dylan Thomas, from Swansea. You can watch it live here.
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Boris Johnson has abandoned a walkabout in Westhoughton, Lancashire, after about 100 protesters took to the town’s high street along with a large screen with a photo of the prime minister with Donald Trump.
“Have they just done the UK’s biggest drug deal?” it asked.
The PM had planned to meet voters in the marginal Bolton West constituency, taken by the Tories’ Chris Green in 2015 after holding off Labour’s Julie Hilling by just 936 votes in 2017.
But after the Tory battle bus arrived in town it was decided that the visit should be abandoned, amid the presence of protesters.
The demonstrators, some of whom were from the Socialist Worker newspaper and holding banners saying: “No to Racism, No to Boris Johnson”, had lined the high street where the walkabout was expected to take place.
Instead, Johnson travelled back to London by car after his trip to the north-west on Saturday and his battle bus also headed south.
Boris Johnson was due to cone to Westhoughton but the visit has been cancelled - a group of protestors had gathered ahead of his arrival @GranadaReports pic.twitter.com/5kKbOc6gfu
— Hannah Miller (@hannahITV) December 7, 2019
The police have now arrived and Westhoughton Market is in lockdown after market traders say protestors tried to force their way in @GranadaReports pic.twitter.com/4EMuY8h4mG
— Hannah Miller (@hannahITV) December 7, 2019
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Jo Swinson has insisted she would not quit as leader of the Liberal Democrats leader if the party fails to make significant gains in the general election.
Asked if she would stand down in such circumstances, Swinson said:
No, because I have just been elected as leader of the Liberal Democrats four months ago with an overwhelming majority.
We have got more members than we have ever had before and we are running a strong campaign. So, people have got confidence in my leadership and I’m excited to be doing the job.
Boris Johnson has been asked about the issue of a potential Russian link to the NHS documents while on a campaign event in Cheshire.
Well I do think we need to get to the bottom of that. As far as I am aware we haven’t yet established the truth about that, but what I certainly think is that document, whatever it was intended to prove, did not prove what Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party hoped it would prove. And I’m afraid it was just another distraction.
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Russia link to NHS documents 'nonsense' says Corbyn
Jeremy Corbyn has been asked about Reddit’s announcement that documents used by Labour as evidence that the NHS would be on the table in a post-Brexit US trade deal were posted by an account linked to a disinformation campaign directed by Moscow. (See our story here.)
He was asked to respond to the suggestion that Labour had either directly or indirectly benefited from a Russian trolling operation.
This is such nonsense. This is such an advanced state of rather belated conspiracy theories by the prime minister. When we released the documents, at no stage did the prime minister or anybody deny that those documents were real, deny the arguments that we put forward.
And if there has been no discussion with the US about access to our health markets, if all of that is wrong, how come after a week they still haven’t said that?
The issues are that those documents show exactly what the British government is doing in discussions with Donald Trump’s administration in the USA and also why the prime minister has refused to release the report on Russian interference in British politics, which he’s been sitting on for a very long time.
He refused to say from where the Labour party had obtained the documents.
We obtained those documents. We believed those documents to be correct and nobody until yesterday denied the correctness of those documents. The issue is there should be no interference in British politics by anybody else. The prime minister has answers to give, which he refuses to do, about Russian donations to the Tory party or the report that he is sitting on about Russian interference in British politics. Of course there should be no interference in our British political system by Donald Trump or the Russians.
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More photo ops on the campaign trail. You can watch a live stream of Jeremy Corbyn making a latte on a visit to a cafe in Swansea here:
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Boris Johnson has been visiting Cheadle, near Stockport, where he attended a junior girls’ soccer match between Hazel Grove United U10s and Poynton Juniors u10s.
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The PA news agency has been following Nigel Farage on his visit to Sedgefield in County Durham. The Brexit party leader donned a hard hat and protective glasses as he visited the factory of Tolley Fabrications, a company specialising in aluminium, stainless steel and super-duplex fabrications.
He was asked by a worker who he trusted most out of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn . “Do you know something, that’s the most difficult question I’ve been asked,” he responded. “I’ve known Boris on and off for 25 years, and he is a likeable, entertaining personality. Would you absolutely trust him? No.”
When asked whether the prime minister could be trusted to deliver Brexit, Farage said:
‘Get Brexit done’ is an attractive line to a country where a lot of people are utterly cheesed off that this has been going on for three-and-a-half years.
The idea that somebody’s going to wave a magic wand is very appealing, and if it was true I would support him 100%.
But it’s not. If he passes the withdrawal agreement unamended, we go into three more years of agony. It will be Brexit in name only, but we’ll still be stuck with all the European rules and regulations, with no say whatsoever and with a huge bill.
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Here is the latest piece of polling analysis by Dan Sabbagh, defence and security editor and our resident polling expert for the election.
A week to go before the election and the Conservative vote appears to have peaked. The party’s share hit 42% about a fortnight ago and has not advanced since – a level that is intriguingly similar to the 42.34% result achieved by Theresa May in the last general election.
The party now dominates the leave vote – with a 69% share, according to ICM’s analysis published this week – following the effective surrender of Nigel Farage in the early part of the campaign. Essentially, the Conservatives’ five-point improvement during the campaign has been almost entirely at the Brexit party’s expense.
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Labour's environmental policies best, say Friends of the Earth
Friends of the Earth has judged that Labour has the most impressive environmental policies of any of the main UK-wide political parties. The organisation examined the manifestos of the Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrats and Green parties and scored each against their election asks, which covered 10 areas, including climate targets, energy, transport, food and nature. The manifestos were marked out of 45. They said:
The final assessment saw Labour, Lib Dems and Greens all marked highly, but with the Labour party given a slightly higher score overall. The Conservative party scored poorly: its manifesto was judged to be missing significant commitments in numerous areas, inadequate policies in others, and actively damaging policies in transport.
Here were the final scores:
- Labour: 33
- Green: 31
- Liberal Democrat: 30
- Conservatives: 5.5
Dave Timms, Friends of the Earth’s head of political affairs, said:
Environmental issues have been given greater priority in this election than ever before – and with the world in the midst of an ecological and climate crisis this must be the next government’s top priority.
Many of the policies that Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Green party have put forward are commensurate with, or striving to meet, the challenges we face. It is disappointing we have not yet seen the same urgency, ambition or consistency from the Conservative party.
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The shadow transport secretary, Andy McDonald, has also been on both the Today programme and Sky News. He’s been setting out Labour’s plans to electrify England’s entire bus fleet. You can read the story here:
In the light of claims that UK government documents leaked online – and used by Labour to hammer home their argument about NHS vulnerability in post-Brexit US/UK trade talks – could have been subject to Russian interference, McDonald said it would be perfectly legitimate to hold an inquiry.
I think that’s perfectly legitimate. I think what interests me particularly is the content of the documents.
He called on the government to publish the report by parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC) into possible Russian interference in the UK democratic process.
If we want to get to the bottom of the extent to which the Russian state interferes in elections, can we please publish the Intelligence and Security Committee report? Let’s get that out there. That should have been published ages ago.
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Here’s a roundup of what is happening on the campaign trail today. Today is “small business Saturday”, so expect the party leaders to be setting out their offerings to small business owners.
- Boris Johnson is visiting north-west England, although his exact plans have not yet been disclosed.
- Jeremy Corbyn takes the Labour campaign to Wales, touring the country and appearing at a rally.
- Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson will visit Hertfordshire to discuss her policies with small businesses to try to convince them to back her party.
- The Brexit party leader, Nigel Farage, travels to Sedgefield in County Durham, where he will also meet business representatives.
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Culture secretary: Russian involvement in leaked NHS papers extremely serious
The outgoing culture secretary, Nicky Morgan, has been speaking to broadcasters this morning about the Conservative party’s pledge to invest £550m in grassroots football. (You can read the BBC story here.)
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that it was “extremely serious” that leaked documents – used by Labour to claim that the US wanted NHS to be included in future trade deals – could be linked to a Russian disinformation campaign.
You can read the background here:
I understand from what was being put on that website, those who seem to know about these things say that it seems to have all the hallmarks of some form of interference. And if that is the case, that obviously is extremely serious. And actually as culture secretary, obviously one of the things that we are looking for and monitoring is any interference in our elections.
She was later asked by Sky News why, if they were so concerned about Russian interference, had No 10 blocked the publication of a report examining the country’s infiltration of British politics. She said it had been a matter of timing and the speed with which parliament had been dissolved. “There hasn’t been a parliament to publish that report to,” she said.
All I can say is the government, obviously, is taking steps. We are very aware of the potential for overseas interference and watching very carefully through lots of different channels as to what potentially might be going on.
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Here’s a video of the highlights from last night’s debate –
Good morning and welcome to the politics live blog on the morning after Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson went head-to-head in a BBC debate.
The party leaders clashed over Islamophobia and antisemitism in their parties, with both accusing the other of “a failure of leadership”.
Johnson said: “I think that Mr Corbyn’s handling of this particular issue, his unwillingness to take a stand and stand up for Jewish people in the Labour party and put an arm round them is a failure of leadership.”
Corbyn hit back: “A failure of leadership is when you use racist remarks to describe people from different countries or in our society. I will never do that … I hope that the prime minister understands the hurt that people feel when they hear remarks and articles he has written.”
You can read the full write-up from the Guardian’s deputy political editor, Rowena Mason, and political correspondent Kate Proctor here. And political correspondent Peter Walker has an assessment of who won the debate here.
A snap poll from YouGov found 52% of Britons asked after watching the debate believed Johnson won and 48% Corbyn. The pollster said it fell within the margin of error and so could be considered another draw. Those surveyed said Corbyn was more trustworthy than Johnson by 48% to 38% but Johnson was considered more prime ministerial by 54% to 30%.
We have fact-checked claims made by the two party leaders.
I’ll be here to guide you through the day’s political developments. You can tweet at me on @fperraudin and comment below.
