Starmer says Sunak’s claim UK has ‘turned the corner’ is ‘form of disrespect’ because that’s not what people feel
Starmer says he is fed up with hearing Rishi Sunak says the UK has “turned the corner”.
That is “a form of disrespect in itself”, he says.
Taxes are higher than at any time since the war, he says. And he claims Sunak’s commitment to abolishing national insurance means he is prepared to repeat the mistakes of Liz Truss all over again.
Key events
Q: Can you win East Worthing and Shoreham for the first time since 1997?
Yes, says Starmer.
That prompts a large round of applause from Labour activists in the audience.
He says he is determined to make progress in the south east of London. He knows from his background what people in Sussex want, he says.
‘Stop’ – Starmer says that would be his message to Israel PM about Rafah offensive after bombing of refugee camp
Q: If you were PM, what would you be saying to Benjamin Netanyhu in the light of the attack on the refugee camp in Gaza?
Starmer replies: “Stop.”
He goes on:
Those reports are horrifying. And what makes it worse is that this was a safe space with women or children in it and families that already fled a number of times. It is horrifying to see that.
I’ve been saying for some time that the Rafah offensive should not take place and what you saw there was the consequences, the inevitable consequences, of that offensive.
Q: Some form of national service is quite popular with voters. And, as the father of a teenage son, how do you think he and his friends would feel about this?
Starmer says the UK needs strong defences. But this policy is desperate, he says. And it has not been thought through.
He says his priority would be levelling up and the NHS.
‘Just so desperate’ – Starmer dismisses Tory claims he is finding campaign tiring
Sunak is now taking questions.
Q: [From Anushka Asthana] The Tories says you are getting tired. What do you think they are getting at, and how would you respond?
Sunak says the Tories are “just so desperate”.
He says he has a plan he is sticking to. Maybe the Tories don’t appreciate that, because they don’t stick to their plans, he suggests.
The question referred to briefing from CCHQ over the weekend. Stefan Boscia has a good summary in his London Playbook briefing. He says:
Snoozin’ Starmer: The Tories are clearly trying to make Starmer’s age a thing early in the campaign (he’s 61), with aides repeatedly calling him “weary” on Sunday afternoon. CCHQ is doubling down on this message today, with a statement from Tory Party Chair Richard Holden saying it was “bizarre that Sir Keir Starmer … spent the day at home resting ahead of a speech which doesn’t say anything.” One Conservative aide went further by telling the Sun’s Harry Cole that Starmer should be known as “Sir Sleepy,” while another calls him “Sleepy Keir” in a story by the FT’s George Parker.
Trump playbook: The new nicknames are (obvs) inspired by Donald Trump’s childish nickname for Joe Biden, “Sleepy Joe,” and an attempt to contrast Starmer’s steady managerialism with the 44-year-old Sunak’s famously high-energy approach. In reality the Labour leader is a full 20 years younger than President Biden, and it is obviously a bit of a stretch to pretend he’s an old man pining for slippers and an open fire over the campaign trail, but hey — this is modern politics. Labour are rubbishing the claims as an example of “desperation” and point out Starmer was out campaigning the very day the election was called.
Starmer says he has been criticised for changes he has made. (He is referring in particular to his decision to drop some of the leftwing policies he championed when he was standing for Labour leader.)
He says, in taking these decisions, he always put the country first.
And he contrasts this with Rishi Sunak’s approach. Sunak always gives in when confronted with factions of his party.
Starmer ends by saying, just as he changed the Labour party, he can change the country.
Starmer says Tory plan for ‘teenage Dad’s Army’ is sign of desperation
Starmer is now mocking Sunak over his approach to the election.
He says there has been a new plan every week, a new strategy every month, a new election campaign every day.
And he describes the national sevice plan, for a “teenage Dad’s Army”, as a sign of desparation.
And he is particularly crititical about the proposal to fund it “by cancelling levelling up and with money from tax avoidance that we would use to invest in our NHS”.
Starmer is now running through his six first step promises.
Starmer says Sunak’s claim UK has ‘turned the corner’ is ‘form of disrespect’ because that’s not what people feel
Starmer says he is fed up with hearing Rishi Sunak says the UK has “turned the corner”.
That is “a form of disrespect in itself”, he says.
Taxes are higher than at any time since the war, he says. And he claims Sunak’s commitment to abolishing national insurance means he is prepared to repeat the mistakes of Liz Truss all over again.
Starmer says in the 1970s people like his parents were able to think that, whatever disadvantages they had, they could be confident that their children would have a better future.
He says, after 14 years of the Conservatives, people cannot look forward to the future like this.
And he is now talking about security, using the passage briefed in advance about how he can be trusted on this. (See 9.54am.)
Starmer describes his upbringing in Oxted, a rural town ‘about as English as it gets’
Starmer says character is shaped by where you grow up.
He says he grew up in Oxted, which is not far from Lancing.
He urges people in the audience to go. He says it is “about as English as it gets”.
He says it was a mix of Victorian red brick and pebbledash homes, with “rolling hills” and pastures all around.
He says he loved growing up there.
You could make easy money clearing stones for the local farmers. That was actually my first ever job.
You could play football until the cows came home. Literally.
His football team shared a pitch with the cows, he says.
He recalls his parents. And he says, in the 1970s, they experienced the impact of inflation. They knew what it was like not being able to pay the bills. They had to decide what bill they would not pay, and chose to have the phone cut off.
Starmer delivers election speech
Keir Starmer is in Lancing, in the constituency of East Worthing and Shoreham. It is seat where Tim Loughton has been the Tory MP. At the last election he had a majority of 7,474, but Labour now hopes to take the seat.
Tom Rutland, the Labour candidate, introduced Starmer.
And Starmer is speaking now.
‘I make this promise: I will fight for you’ – Starmer tells voters they can trust him on security
As Eleni Courea and Aletha Adu report in their preview of the speech Keir Starmer is giving tomorrow, he will try to use it to reassure voters who may have concerns about Labour.
In the speech Starmer will say:
Whatever the polls say, I know there are countless people who haven’t decided how they’ll vote in this election.
They’re fed up with the failure, chaos and division of the Tories, but they still have questions about us. Has Labour changed enough? Do I trust them with my money, our borders, and our security?
My answer is yes you can – because I have changed this party. Permanently. This has been my driving mission since day one. I was determined to change Labour so that it could serve the British people …
The very foundation of any good government is economic security, border security, and national security.
Make no mistake, if the British people give us the opportunity to serve, then this is their core test. It is always their core test.
I haven’t worked for four years on this, just to stop now. This is the foundation, the bedrock that our manifesto and our first steps will be built upon …
I know those people are looking at this election, looking at me personally. So, I make this promise: I will fight for you.
I took this Labour party four years ago, and I changed it into the party you see today. I was criticised for some of the changes I’ve made, change is always like that.
There are always people who say, don’t do that, don’t go so fast. But whenever I face a fork in the road, it always comes back to this: the golden thread: country first, party second.
Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, was giving interviews this morning. She told Times Radio that Starmer would “do everything within his power to keep our country safe”.
She also confirmed the Times splash saying that, if Labour is elected, it will carry out a 100-day “sprint review” of all the security threats facing the UK, in addition to the full security and defence review already planned. The Times says it will cover threats including “those from Russia, Iran and other hostile states, extremism and generative artificial intelligence that has been used to create chatbot terrorists online to recruit radicals”.
Teenagers who dodge Tories’ proposed national service could be harming their job prospects, ministers suggest
The Conservatives have said they want to make participation in their proposed national service compuslory for 18-year-olds, but they have not said how they would do this. Yesterday James Cleverly, the home secretary, ruled out imposing criminal sanctions on people who did not join in.
This morning Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the Foreign Office minister, told ITV that teenagers who did dodge national service might be harming their job prospects.
She said she wanted participation to be seen as “part of the norms”. She went on:
Importantly, of course, when you then as a young person apply for a job, there will be a question that employers will want to know how you got involved – either because were able to achieve one of the 30,000 places (in the armed forces) or because you were volunteering in one or other part of your community.
As the Financial Times reports, yesterday Rishi Sunak said that people who have done national service could get preference when applying for university or for an apprenticeship, or in interviews for the civil service’s fast-track programme. He said:
We want to make sure Britain’s future generations can get the most out of national service. That’s why we’re looking into ways it can open doors they wouldn’t otherwise get in work or education.
This morning, asked if the parents of teenagers who refused to sign up for national service could face prosectution, Trevelyan said she could not give details now, and that this was the sort of issue the proposed royal commission would look at.
Libby Brooks
A sleepy bank holiday listener to BBC Radio Scotland would be forgiven for getting their party leaders mixed up this morning.
Lib Dem leader Ed Davey was speaking to Good Morning Scotland ahead of launching the party’s Scotland campaign later today – but it was curious to hear him borrowing from both Labour – “we are part of the change” – and the SNP – “vote Lib Dem to send a message to Westminster”.
With four seats on Scotland, the Lib Dems are eyeing up the weakness of the SNP and targeting others, in particular the seats of former leaders Jo Swinson and Charles Kennedy.
It was clear from the interview just how desperate the Lib Dems are to return to third place in the Commons behind Labour and the Tories – not surprising given the profile it has brought the SNP since 2015 – and this will be one of the key battles in this election campaign.
We don’t have comments open yet, but we plan to open them at 10am. Because it’s a bank holiday, we don’t have as many moderators working as usual.
Starmer and Sunak on campaign trail as Labour says Tory national service pledge ‘unravelling by the minute’
Good morning. We had the first big policy surprise of the election campaign at the weekend, and the Conservative plan to bring back a form of compulsory national service has had a mixed reception, to put it politely. As Eleni Courea and Aletha Adu report, a former head of the navy has described it as bonkers.
The propoal gets an enthusiastic write-up on the front page of the Tory loyalist Daily Express.
But the Daily Mail is notably more equivocal in its coverage.
Last night, in a sign they think the Conservatives are vulnerable on this issue, Labour issued a lengthy briefing note highlighting 22 “unanswered questions” about the policy. Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the Foreign Office minister, was doing a media round this morning, and when some of these were put to her on the Today programme, her answers were not particularly compelling.
Labour says:
The MoD could have to supply a 50% increase in Army accommodation, which based on the cost for new bed spaces could cost £4.8bn just on accommodation. Does the Conservatives’ costs take this into account?
When Justin Webb asked the minister a version of this question, saying she must have “some idea” where the new recruits would live, Trevelyan just said that a royal commission would consider the details, and that the Tories were not planning to implement this in full until the end of the next parliament.
And Labour says:
The National Citizen Service had its funding slashed by two-thirds by the government in 2022, when Rishi Sunak was chancellor. What were the flaws in that model of youth service which made it a bad use of money, that have been corrected in the new plan proposed this week?
Webb suggested that proposing to spend £2.5bn a year on national service, having just slashed the budget for the National Citizen Service programme (the voluntary programme launched by David Cameron when he was PM), implied “incoherence”. Asked to explain why the budget for the National Citizen Service had been cut so much, Trevelyan blamed Covid and other shocks to the economy that had led to spending being cut back in some areas.
In addition to highlighting criticisms of the plan from Michael Portillo, a former Tory defence secretary, Labour pointed out that Thin Pinstriped Line, a defence policy blog, has published a withering assessment of the plan. It said: “It’s hard to see how this policy could be delivered for the stated cost of £2.5bn per year given that even rough calculations are showing that it would cost billions more to deliver both short and long term.” Ben Wallace, another former Tory defence secretary, recently said this blog was “the voice of reason” which could not be bettered for defence analysis.
Labour said the policy was clearly unravelling. A party spokesperson said:
The Tories’ National Service promise is unravelling by the minute, with the full scale of the scheme’s unfunded costs growing ever larger, and the list of unanswered questions about how it will work growing ever longer.
Here are some of the main campaign events of the day.
9.30am: Keir Starmer gives a speech, and takes questions from journalists.
Morning: Rishi Sunak is doing a campaign event, and he is also due to record an interview with the BBC’s political editor, Chris Mason. But his main campaign event will be in Chesham and Amersham at 5pm.
The Liberal Democrats are launching their battlebus, which they are calling Yellow Hammer 1.
And the SNP leader and Scottish first minister John Swinney is campaigning in Dumfries.
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