It’s the last day of campaigning, and time to plot your snacks and strategic naps for tomorrow. A quick note before we dive in: unlike many news organisations, the Guardian hasn’t put up a paywall – we want to keep our journalism as open as we can. The Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. Here’s how you can support it.
What’s happening?
A maelstrom of vote-wooing, pledge-waving and opponent-swiping. It’s the final chance for politicians to impress voters with what they think will be the clinching enticements. For Theresa May, it’s a vow to rip up human rights laws to crack down on terror suspects. For Jeremy Corbyn, it’s a warning that there are but “24 hours to save the NHS” (well, it worked for some Tony chap in 1997). For Nicola Sturgeon, it’s a question of whether the UK really wants May tackling Brexit negotiations. For Tim Farron, it’s a question of whether the UK really wants anyone tackling Brexit negotiations.
The PM’s planned pitch today was to be “more jobs, more homes, better roads and railways, and world-class digital connectivity”, but that message is likely to be blanketed by her announcement last night – after another day of pressure over police cuts and questions over security misses – that she has her eye on human rights laws:
I can tell you a few of the things I mean by that: I mean longer prison sentences for people convicted of terrorist offences. I mean making it easier for the authorities to deport foreign terror suspects to their own countries.
And I mean doing more to restrict the freedom and the movements of terrorist suspects when we have enough evidence to know they present a threat, but not enough evidence to prosecute them in full in court.
And if human rights laws stop us from doing it, we will change those laws so we can do it.
Do human rights laws stop her at the moment? May’s opponents say no. The Lib Dem leader accused her of “posturing”, saying: “We have been here before – a kind of nuclear arms race in terror laws might give the appearance of action, but what the security services lack is not more power, but more resources.” Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti told BBC Newsnight: “We can provide any new powers that are truly necessary and proportionate within the human rights framework and within the rule of law.”
For the Sun, which today carries an interview with the PM on her proposed crackdown, that’s not going far enough. If Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter fail “to eradicate the jihadist filth they publish to the world”, the newspaper says:
Mrs May should consider the nuclear option: ordering our internet service providers to shut down these vast sites until they are purged.
From the nuclear option to the Labour leader (and there’s the definition of an awkward segue), who’s taken his turn in the Mirror to urge voters to achieve “something special” and put him into No 10.
The message – “We are going to win” – is clear. The handwriting is not (though I believe he’s signed it “Jez”). Answers on a placard, please.
Voice of the Mirror: Give hope a chance and vote Labour on Thursday https://t.co/w2ZZb4heIj pic.twitter.com/IWzFvuOugG
— Mirror Politics (@MirrorPolitics) June 6, 2017
I can’t decipher a “Brexit” in there, but it’s a drum that will be getting a thwack from other parties today. The Lib Dems are urging tactical voting against the “hapless and heartless” Tories. Sturgeon tells the Guardian that May’s dire warnings about Brexit talks beginning just 11 days after the election were a peculiar diary clash:
Did she only find that out after she called the election? It does seem a pretty bizarre argument to underline the importance of the Brexit negotiations and the imminence of the start of the negotiations when she took the decision to call an election that has dominated, presumably, her time and everyone else’s time for the past two months.
In a testy Scottish leaders’ debate on STV on Tuesday evening, Sturgeon also ran up against her Labour counterpart, Kezia Dugdale, claiming Dugdale had conceded in a private conversation the day after the Brexit vote that her party ought to drop its opposition to an independence referendum. The claim, Dugdale responded, was “absolute nonsense”, upping this in a later tweet to “a categoric lie”.
At a glance:
- The Guardian view on Northern Ireland’s election.
- From the BBC: DUP rejects Loyalist endorsement.
- Kezia Dugdale and Carwyn Jones at odds over Labour support for Barnett formula.
- Who can I vote for? Find out about your election candidates.
- What the manifestos mean for public services: health; social care; social security; housing; disability; local government; home affairs; the civil service; the environment; and devolved powers.
- Catch up with the Guardian’s Election Daily podcast.
Poll position
Opinium’s final poll before the only real poll settles on the Conservatives with 43% (unchanged from its Saturday survey) and Labour on 36%, down one. The Lib Dems sit on 8%, with Ukip on 5%. That’s in keeping with overall poll trackers, which have the gap at the top somewhere between six points (FT) and nine (Guardian).
There’s dampening news for Labour supporters hoping an effusion of young voters will swoosh Corbyn into Downing Street: fresh research from the National Centre for Social Research suggests barely half of under-30s (53%) say they are certain to vote.
Diary
- Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn and Tim Farron criss-cross the country in search of last-minute votes. The PM hits south-east and eastern England, plus the Midlands; the Labour leader travels from Glasgow to a final rally in London; and the Lib Dem leader will round off his day in Oxford.
- Early start for Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale, joined by candidate Ian Murray and Alistair Darling in Edinburgh first thing.
- Scottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie is in Cupar, Fife.
- At 10am, the Scottish Greens protest outside the US consulate in Edinburgh over Donald Trump’s junking of the Paris climate accord.
- Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood is out and about in Treorchy this morning.
- Nicola Sturgeon joins the crowded campaign trail in Edinburgh this afternoon, after first minister’s questions at Holyrood at noon.
Read these
Roger Cohen in the New York Times argues the case for Corbyn:
Elections take place in the real world; they often involve unpleasant choices. I dislike Corbyn’s anti-Americanism, his long flirtation with Hamas, his coterie’s clueless leftover Marxism and anti-Zionism, his Nato bashing, his unworkable tax-and-spend promises. He’s of that awful cold war left that actually believed Soviet Moscow was probably not as bad as Washington.
Still, Corbyn would not do May’s shameful Trump-love thing. He would not succumb to the jingoistic anti-immigration talk of the Tories. After the terrorist attacks, he said ‘difficult conversations’ were needed with Saudi Arabia: Hallelujah! He would tackle rising inequality. He would seek a soft departure from the European Union keeping Britain as close to Europe as possible. His victory – still improbable – would constitute punishment of the Tories for the disaster of Brexit. Seldom would a political comeuppance be so merited.
And in Holyrood magazine, Mandy Rhodes profiles the man who has become a staple of TV election coverage without being called Dimbleby – Professor John Curtice:
For 24 hours, Curtice lives and breathes a general election. As voters head to the polling stations, he is holed up in a top secret location in central London along with a small group of other academics and number crunchers. From early morning, exit poll data compiled at over 100 selected polling stations starts to pour in to the charmless BBC office where the analysis begins. By early afternoon, clear patterns are beginning to emerge, allowing the boffins to start to make more detailed predictions about seats won and lost. At about 2pm, Curtice could make a fair punt at the result but he won’t, yet.
There is a small window of time as the polling stations close, before David Dimbleby makes the announcement, and before Curtice steps into the taxi at 10.03pm which will ferry him to the BBC studios at Elstree to begin a marathon of political commentary through the night, where only he really knows what the exit poll is saying and what it could mean for the country. He also knows that there is that chance (albeit a slim one in the context of his past record) that whatever the exit poll says, he and his team could be the heroes or zeroes of the day when the final tally is realised. But there is little time to ponder. Curtice gets to the studio and the one question on everyone’s lips is ‘who is in and who is out?’ And so it begins.
Revelation of the day
The lengths politicians will go to in order to show their human side … Theresa May confessed to running through fields of wheat as a child, the scamp. My colleague Elena Cresci Allen-key-twisted these Welsh politicians into attempting to assemble a strong and stable flatpack bedside table (the results were more cabinet of chaos). But the winner today – and surely of the campaign – must be Greg Knight, the Conservative candidate for East Yorkshire. If you haven’t seen his video, I insist you stop reading right away and watch it. Yes, now. I can wait.
The day in a tweet
It’s a cross-stitch of the election polls, of course.
When am I allowed to sleep pic.twitter.com/rVumChSV6q
— Mothra Theresa (@SirSandGoblin) June 6, 2017
And another thing
Would you like to wake up to the Snap briefing in your inbox every day until the election is over? Then sign up here. And once the election is – as I am promised it one day will be – over, the Snap will be too, so why not sign up for the Guardian morning briefing? You can read the latest edition here.
Comments are open on the politics live blog.
.png?w=600)
