General election live news: Ellwood says Tory betting scandal will cost party seats as Sunak urged to suspend candidates

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary re answering questions from pupils during a visit to a school in the East Midlands this morning.

The first question was about Labour’s plan to lower the voting age to 16.

Sir Keir said: “I think that if you pay tax you should be allowed to say what you think your tax should be spent on.”

Paul Johnson has said policies proposed by Reform UK and the Green party are “wholly unattainable” becuase they won’t form a government.

He said Reform is trying to “poison the entire political debate” by attacking the main parties knowing they will not get into power.

Citing the Green manifesto, he says: “The choices in front of us are hard. High taxes, high debt, struggling public services, make them so. Pressures from health, defence, welfare, ageing will not make them easier.

“That is not a reason to hide the choices or to duck them. Quite the reverse. Yet hidden and ducked they have been.”

Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies,is giving his veredict on the Labour and Conservative approach to boost the economy.

Speaking from London, he said: “They have singularly failed even to acknowledge some of the most important issues and choices to have faced us for a very long time.”

The think tank chief claimed services “will likely need to be cut over the next five years” to reduce taxes, which he said are at record high. “Not necessarily a recipe for a happy electorate,” he adds.

Citing the tax system changes both parties proposed, he said: “The manifesto tells us more about what they won’t do than what they will.”

The state of the public finances mean “painful” economic choices after the election – but a conspiracy of silence between the main parties is leaving voters in the dark, the Institute of Fiscal Studies has warned.

The highly-respected Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has slammed the party’s manifestos warning they leave people “guessing” on future tax rises and public spending cuts.

Read the full article from The Independent’s Whitehall Editor Kate Devlin:

The Independent’s Alex Ross spent a morning with Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg on the campaign trail North east Somerset and Hanham.

Sir Jacob was elected MP for North East Somerset 14 years ago, but is facing the very real threat of losing his seat on 4 July.

As Rees-Mogg went from door to door in an affluent area, it wasn’t so much his Labour competitor Dan Norris exciting voters but Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

Can the Conservatives have any hope with Farage in the picture?

Watch the full video report below:

Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said the Conservative Party was hiding “behind the Gambling Commission” and it was “entirely reasonable” for Labour’s national campaign co-ordinator to write to the watchdog.

Asked about comments by Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris who claimed Labour was trying to put “undue influence” on the Gambling Commission to reveal details of its investigation, Mr Streeting said: “Pat McFadden’s letter to the Gambling Commission is entirely reasonable.”

He told Times Radio: “The audacity of the Conservative Party to hide behind the Gambling Commission, to not answer straightforward questions of the Prime Minister about who knew what, who’s implicated, who’s under investigation, and what he’s going to do about it.”

He added: “I think people should greet with enormous suspicion, the fact that the Conservatives are trying to cover up in the middle of an election campaign, which of their candidates is under investigation for serious wrongdoing.”

Nigel Farage has accused Boris Johnson of being a “liar and a hypocrite” after the former prime minister attacked the Reform leader for his comments on Ukraine.

Mr Farage came under fire for claiming that the West provoked Russia’s war of Ukraine during the BBC Panorma interview.

Mr Johnson branded the comments a “nauseating ahistorical drivel and more Kremlin propaganda”.

In response, the right-wing politician suggested the former Tory minister had blamed the EU for Russia’s 2014 attacks.

Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said “biological women have felt excluded” at times in debates on transgender rights.

He told Times Radio: “I think at times in pursuit of inclusion we’ve ended up in a position where women have felt excluded, biological women have felt excluded.

“And there are practical examples of this in terms of things like NHS language and documentation.”

Asked about Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s position on the issue, Mr Streeting said: “I think what Keir has been trying to do on this – I think we all have – is to try and respect the fact that there are people whose gender identity is different from their biological sex and to try and be as inclusive as possible.”

Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris has said he would place bets on “individual seats” as he has done in the past if he were “allowed to bet on the election”.

He told Times Radio: “If I was allowed to bet on the election, I would do what I have done in the past which is have bets on individual seats that are what you would be calling too close to call because you know I quite fancied that, like my £1 bet at the beginning of a week on the multiplier for five wins on the football at the weekend.”