General election live: ‘pattern of racist and misogynistic views’ within Reform UK, says Tory minister | General election 2024

Alex Lawson

Will rising debt cause Thames Water to sink under a Labour government? The Observer’s Alex Lawson has written this analysis piece to try and answer that question.

If Labour triumphs in this week’s election, as polls suggest, then top of the incoming business secretary Jonathan Reynolds’s in-tray will be the possible collapse of Thames Water. The Thames timebomb is ticking – and could explode before new MPs have even become fully acquainted with the corridors of Westminster.

To recap, Britain’s biggest water company has been labouring under an £18bn debt mountain and has become the chief target of mounting anger from the public and politicians towards the industry over sewage spills, executive pay and shareholder payouts.

In March, Thames investors refused to stump up a pledged £500m of emergency funding amid a standoff with the industry regulator, Ofwat. So acute are concerns that the government has tasked officials with making contingency plans for a temporary renationalisation, codenamed Project Timber.

Its finances were back in the spotlight this week, when the Guardian revealed that a £150m dividend paid out from the regulated company on 27 March – hours before investors pulled the plug – was being examined by Ofwat. An internal party dossier by Labour’s chief of staff, Sue Gray, seen by the Financial Times, put the company’s potential collapse high on the party’s “risk register” after taking power, alongside prison overcrowding, bankrupt councils and an NHS funding shortfall.

One of the first tests will be the postponed publication of Ofwat’s proposals for the water industry on 11 July. The regulator had been due to release its draft “price review 24” – the process by which it determines how much each company can charge customers over the following five years – on 12 June, but the pivotal moment was delayed by Rishi Sunak’s soggy early election announcement.

The Conservative party deputy chair Angela Richardson called the sewage crisis a “political football” and claimed opposition parties and activists had put Tory MPs in physical danger by campaigning on the issue.

Richardson, who is standing for re-election in Guildford, where the River Wey was recently found to have 10 times the safe limit of E coli, also suggested the only reason people were talking about the problem was “because the Conservatives let everyone know it was happening”.

Speaking at a hustings held last week by Zero Carbon Guildford, Richardson was asked about her party’s record on sewage spills. “The reason we’re all talking about this is because the Conservatives let everyone know it was happening,” she said. “If you go and have a look at the manifestos in 2019 you will not find anything about water quality. It is a very, very convenient hobby horse to jump on and attack Conservative MPs for voting against things that would not work.”

She added that activists putting up blue plaques around the town criticising her record on the issue in 2021 “resulted in a police helicopter above my house and police sniffer dogs through my house”.

“I was in danger because of the actions taken by political parties. It is no laughing matter,” she went on. “So my suggestion to everybody is to actually look at what we’re trying to do, working together and not turning this into a political football that’s actually dangerous.”

In March it was revealed that raw sewage was discharged into waterways for 3.6m hours in 2023 by England’s privatised water firms, more than double the figure in 2022.

The issue has become a theme of this election, as opposition parties take aim at ministers’ failure to get to grips with the crisis.

Research by the Rivers Trust found that sewage was spilled for 1,372 hours in the Guildford constituency last year, and recent water testing by local campaigners found E coli in the river last month at nearly 10 times the safe rate in government standards.

Fiona Harvey

Labour must combine tackling the climate crisis with pursuing social justice, if elected, to show that achieving net zero will not be done “on the backs of the poor”, the UK’s outgoing Green party MP has warned.

Caroline Lucas, who has held the seat of Brighton Pavilion since 2010, said: “The biggest priority is to demonstrate that is not the case. We have to make sure that this is a strategy and a policy that is the opposite of being done on the backs of the poor.”

That should be achievable, she added, as social justice and shifting to a green economy go hand in hand. But if Labour takes power, as polls predict, the party must avoid mistakes that put costs on low-income families or that hurt people’s jobs, she said.

“The truth of it is that the policies that we need to get [greenhouse gas] emissions down are actually policies that will increase people’s wellbeing in any case,” she said. Home insulation was one example, where if a minimum energy efficiency standard were enforced on landlords then tenants would have warmer homes, less energy waste and lower emissions.

“Again and again there are concrete examples of where green policy is actually social justice policy, it’s one and the same thing. But that story doesn’t get told nearly strongly enough.”

Lucas looked beyond the current election to the next, five years away, to warn that a resurgent Conservative or Reform party right wing would be planning to “weaponise” the climate crisis, and would seize on any missteps by Labour on the issue.

“There’s a lot of hope riding on what a new Labour government could do after 14 years of Tory chaos, and if they aren’t seen to deliver something in that first term then I worry about what’s going to happen during those next four or five years is that [Nigel] Farage and [Kemi] Badenoch and whoever else within the Tory right are going to be reorganising and getting ready for a comeback. And surely one of the things they’re going to have on top of their list is going to be rolling back on net zero still further,” she told the Guardian.

You can read the full piece by Fiona Harvey and Damien Gayle here:

With it being Armed Forces Day and both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer scheduled to make visits on the campaign trail marking it, today will feature them pushing the defence and armed forces pledges of their parties.

The prime minister was admonished for leaving the commemoration for the 80th anniversary of D-day early, and will be eager to push his party’s promises to servicemen and women on Armed Forces Day.

According to the PA news agency, Sunak will hail their “duty, dedication and selfless personal sacrifice” and claim the Conservatives are the only party promising to meet the Help for Heroes veterans’ pledge. As well as reiterating the Tories’ manifesto pledge to the armed forces including increasing defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2030, Sunak will also reassert his party’s commitment to the Northern Ireland legacy act, writes the news agency.

Meanwhile, Starmer and shadow defence secretary John Healey will mark Armed Forces Day by joining a veterans’ coffee morning in the south-east of England, where the pair will outline how the next Labour government aims to pay tribute through action.

They will announce new powers for Labour’s planned armed forces commissioner who will be able to investigate and report on issues which affect the lives of service personnel such as substandard housing, faulty kit and poor discharge support.

According to the PA news agency, Starmer will promise Labour will be a “government of service, for those who serve” and that they will “always ensure that those who defend our country have their voices heard at the highest level”.

Elsewhere, Ed Davey will embark on an epic 1,343-mile tour of seats from John o’Groats in northern Scotland to Land’s End in Cornwall in the final days of the campaign. The journey will take in seats that the Liberal Democrats are hoping to take from the Tories and the SNP.

Talking of the SNP, leader John Swinney will be campaigning in the seats of Falkirk, Alloa and Grangemouth and Bathgate and Linlithgow on Saturday, as he claims only SNP MPs will hold the next government to account on austerity cuts.

With less than a week until polls open and predictions of SNP losses to Labour, Swinney will say that Scotland is the only place where the electoral outcome remains on a knife-edge.

Revealed: how Sunak dropped smoking ban amid lobbying from tobacco firms

Rob Davies

Rishi Sunak abandoned his “legacy” policy to ban smoking for future generations amid a backlash from the tobacco industry in the form of legal threats, lobbying and a charm offensive aimed at Conservative MPs, an investigation reveals.

The UK had been on course to become the first country to ban smoking for future generations, via the tobacco and vaping bill, which Downing Street hoped would help define Sunak’s place in British political history.

An investigation by the Guardian and the Examination, a non-profit newsroom that investigates global health threats, has uncovered how the UK’s largest cigarette companies fought against the policy, which would have raised the smoking age by one year every year.

After months of fierce opposition from the industry – and intervention from MPs and thinktanks with ties to tobacco firms – the proposal was excluded from the “wash-up” process, when outgoing governments choose which policies to fast-track and which to drop.

The policy, which in effect banned smoking for anyone born after 2009, was left out despite MPs having voted in favour of it.

Documents and freedom of information requests reveal how four of the world’s largest tobacco firms – the UK’s Imperial Brands and British American Tobacco (BAT), Japan Tobacco International (JTI) and US-headquartered Philip Morris International (PMI) – put ministers on notice of a legal backlash.

Imperial and BAT wrote to the health secretary, Victoria Atkins, in February, to claim the consultation process preceding legislation was “unlawful” because industry views had not been considered.

The Department of Health and Social Care has said it did not need to consider industry views, pointing to guidance included in a World Health Organization global treaty, signed by the UK, that says governments should form smoking policy without influence from cigarette companies.

You can read all about the investigation by Rob Davies and Matthew Chapman here:

Shadow defence secretary John Healey is also on the broadcast round this morning. In an interview with Sky News, Healey said Nigel Farage needed to “get a grip of his own party” and tackle racist and homophobic activists within Reform UK.

He told Sky News:

To some extent, I see him fuelling a row over this Channel 4 film to distract, really, from the fact that there are officials and there are candidates right at the heart of the Reform party, that have been responsible for racist, anti-gay, and other deeply offensive statements.

And it’s for Farage to take action on them. And in the end, the culture and the standards of any political party are set by the leader and Nigel Farage wants to be seen as a leader.

He needs to get a grip of his own party and he’s failing to do that at the moment.”

He compared the situation to the “very similar challenge” faced by Keir Starmer in tackling the “antisemitism that had been allowed to fester in parts of the Labour party”.

“He did that and that’s the responsibility of any leader of any political party,” said Healey.

Security minister Tom Tugendhat has been on the morning broadcast round this Saturday. In an interview with Times Radio, Tugendhat did not rule out a run at the Tory leadership if Rishi Sunak quits following the general election.

Asked if he wanted to be leader, he told Times Radio:

What I want to do is to make sure we’ve got a Conservative leader in this country and that’s why I’m supporting Rishi Sunak. Because the alternative with Keir Starmer, I’m afraid, is higher taxes, more regulation, worse growth and more unemployment.

What we need to do is to make sure that Conservatives across this country win their seats and that’s exactly what I’ve been focused on.”

Pressed again on the issue of what happens after the election, he said:

Well, we’ll deal with hypotheticals in a different way. I mean, the reality is Rishi Sunak is the candidate, there’s only two candidates for prime minister, there’s Rishi Sunak and there’s Sir Keir Starmer.

One of them is committed to lowering your taxes, protecting your borders and making a difference in everybody’s lives. The other, I’m afraid, is Sir Keir Starmer who is committed to raising your taxes, to making life a little bit harder for everybody and to lecturing you on how to live your life.”

During the same interview, Tugendhat said there was a “pattern of racist and misogynistic views” within Reform UK.

He told Times Radio:

There’s many decent people vote for every political party and there’s many decent people who will vote for Reform. But what we’re trying to do is to remind people, to try to make clear to people, what it is that Reform really is.

He said Nigel Farage has “clearly done almost no due diligence on who he’s asking to carry his message”.

“There is a real pattern of racist and misogynistic views in the party. I think it’s absolutely right to call it out,” he added.

Good morning, and welcome to our continued coverage of the 2024 general election campaign. It is the final weekend before voters go to the polls on Thursday 4 July.

Security minister Tom Tugendhat has said there is a “pattern of racist and misogynistic views” within Reform UK.

He told Times Radio:

There’s many decent people vote for every political party and there’s many decent people who will vote for Reform.

But what we’re trying to do is to remind people, to try to make clear to people, what it is that Reform really is.”

He said Nigel Farage has “clearly done almost no due diligence on who he’s asking to carry his message”.

“There is a real pattern of racist and misogynistic views in the party. I think it’s absolutely right to call it out,” he added.

Farage, meanwhile, has claimed that an activist in question, Andrew Parker, is an actor and that the clip was a fabrication. The Reform UK leader repeated his assertion that Channel 4’s footage was a “set up” during last night’s BBC Question Time. Earlier on Friday, he’d appeared on ITV’s Loose Women and said that the Parker incident was orchestrated to discredit his party.

In other news, here are some of the events we can expect politicians to be attending today, according to the PA news agency:

• Rishi Sunak will be campaigning with an Armed Forces Day visit near Catterick in his Richmond and Northallerton constituency at 11am. This evening he’ll be at a community visit in Neasden, north west London.

• Labour leader Keir Starmer and shadow defence secretary John Healey will join veterans in the Aldershot, Hampshire, at a coffee morning to mark Armed Forces Day at 9am. In the evening, Starmer will speak at a major event in London after speeches from deputy leader Angela Rayner.

• Liberal Democrats leader Ed Davey will be out campaigning in Scotland, with a tour that’ll take in Fife, Edinburgh and East Dunbartonshire.

• Northern Ireland secretary of state Chris Heaton-Harris will address the Tory manifesto launch event in Belfast.

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