Nick Ferrari conducted a phone-in with Keir Starmer that was deemed one of the most damaging interviews the Labour leader has given, particularly in relation to comments made about Israel during the Israel-Hamas conflict. Despite some evasiveness on issues like serving in a Corbyn cabinet and ruling out council tax increases, Starmer came out relatively unscathed overall. His confidence and handling of other questions suggest a belief that he will be the next prime minister, with the evidence pointing in his favor.
Starmer questioned over Corbyn, council tax and Israel during phone-in – UK general election live | Politics
Starmer’s LBC phone-in – snap verdict
Nick Ferrari was responsible for perhaps the most damaging interview Keir Starmer has ever given as Labour leader, the one soon after the Israel-Hamas war started where Starmer seemed to say Israel was entitled to cut water and power supplies to Gaza. (Starmer says that is not what he meant to say, and that his message was not clear because he and Ferrari were talking over each other at one point.) Phone-ins can be perilous during an election campaign, but there was nothing Ferrari, or any of his callers, said this time that sunk the Labour leader. Overall, Starmer came out pretty well.
On two issues, he was particulary evasive. Starmer is determined not to admit publicly that anything he said about Jeremy Corbyn when he served in his shadow cabinet was a lie, and he wriggled repeatedly when asked if he would have served in a Corbyn cabinet. (See 9.34am.) It was not very dignified, and it served as a reminder of how other politicians can bat away questions like this more easily. Last week, faced with a similar hypothetical question, David Cameron brushed it off quoting Gino D’Acampo. “If my mother had wheels she’d be a bicycle, I don’t answer questions beginning with the word if,” he said. Starmer might have been better using a line like this. But does the Corbyn issue really matter that much? Voters know that when MPs praise their leaders during election campaigns, they are not always being 100% sincere, and no one following politics at the time ever believed that Starmer was a arch-Corbynista.
Second, Starmer refused to rule out council tax going up, in such a way as to suggest that he was not being candid. (See 9.23am.) This was odd, partly because council tax goes up in cash terms every year anyway for most people, but mainly because Labour seemed to deliberately shift its position on this yesterday, when Jonathan Ashworth said “we are not going to do council tax rebanding”. Was Starmer just not sure what the new line was? It is not clear.
The Telegraph website is currently leading on “Starmer suggests he would have served in Corbyn government”, but neither of his evasions felt like big campaign stories and what was perhaps most striking was just how confident he sounded. He admitted for the first time that he performance in the first debate had not been great (see 10.02am), he was quite withering about the Tories’ latest scaremongering (see 9.55am) and he seemed to be making a negotiating pitch to the BMA junior doctors’ committee, urging them to call off strike action pending talks with a Labour government next month (see 9.19am). In other words, he sounded like he knows he will be the next prime minister. All the evidence suggests he’s right.
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Updated at 12.11 BST
Key events
Rishi Sunak has urged people to register to vote ahead of tonight’s deadline if they haven’t already. Asked if it was important to register, he told journalists:
This election there is a very clear choice. The future of our country is at stake, we are living in uncertain times, people need to decide who’s got the clearest plan and the boldest ideas to deliver a more secure future.
There are details of how to register here.
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Sunak claims intervention by Boris Johnson could ‘make difference’ for Tories
Rishi Sunak has said that interventions by Boris Johnson in the election campaign could “make a difference” for the Tories.
Asked about reports that the Conservatives plan to distribute tens of thousands of letters signed by the former PM, Sunak said:
It’s great that Boris is supporting the Conservative party, I very much welcome that.
He is endorsing many candidates in videos and letters which have been coordinated by the campaign.
I know that will make a difference and, of course, every week he is making the case in his column and making sure that everyone understands what the Labour government would do to this country and why it’s important that everyone votes Conservative and I’m glad he’s doing that.
In truth, Sunak may not feel as posititive about Johnson getting involved in the campaign as these comments imply. The two men have a frosty relationship, with Johnson blaming Sunak for helping to force him out of office, and according to a report by Ben Riley-Smith in the Telegraph today, they have not spoken during the campaign. Johnson has already been recording video messages backing some Tory candidates – but predominantly they are his supporters, and they include Simon Clarke, the former levelling up secretary, who called for Sunak’s resignation earlier this year.
🇬🇧 Boris Backs Simon for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland! 💥
I’m delighted to have the support of @BorisJohnson – the man who saw off Keir Starmer’s attempt to overturn Brexit and to install Jeremy Corbyn as our Prime Minister – twice.
(1/n) pic.twitter.com/PPwJSYLPz0
— Simon Clarke (@SimonClarkeMP) June 14, 2024
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A reader asks:
Something not mentioned enough, and certainly not highlighted as it deserves to be, is that Starmer is about to overturn a massive Tory majority, and not just by a whisker but by a country mile.
Andrew: Is there a precedent in this country’s history for such an electoral reversal?
Given that we don’t know what the result it yet, we can’t say, but if the opinion polls and MRP surveys are even broadly right, you will have to reach quite far back into the history books to find any precedent.
For example, Electoral Calculus currently has Labour on course for a majority of 272. Its MRP with Find Out Now had Labour on course for a majority of 302. The YouGov MRP had Labour heading for a majority of 194. More in Common’s MRP was much more pessimistic – pointing to a Labour majority of just 114. But the Survation MRP for Best for Britain, published in the Sunday Times this weekend, had Labour looking at a majority of 262.
The More in Common projection (the worst for Labour from these five) has Labour winning 382 seats. The Find Out Now one (the best of the five for the party) has Labour getting 476 seats.
In a fascinating post on the Comment is Freed Substack yesterday, the elections expert Dylan Difford examined in detail all the various electoral records the result next week might break. His article is well worth reading in full, but this is what he says about milestones that Labour might pass.
Getting into the 390s [number of seats] puts Starmer on a par with the landslides of Clement Attlee in 1945 and Margaret Thatcher in 1983.
420 seats are needed to top Blair’s seat haul, but owing to there being fewer seats than in 1997, 415 will be enough to secure the largest majority in post-war Britain.
Climbing to 430 seats would see Starmer in charge of the largest single-party majority since the introduction of majority male suffrage, overtaking the Conservatives’ landslide from a century ago, while 447 would create a majority larger than that attained by the National Government parties in 1935.
Surpassing the 493-seat majority of the National Government in 1931, however, seems fanciful, requiring Labour to take 540 seats. However, some models do suggest that overtaking the 470 seats won by the Conservatives in that election is not wholly implausible, which would be the most seats ever won by one party in a western democratic election.
And this is what Difford says about precedents for how few seats the Conservatives might be left with.
Falling below a third of seats (217) would be fairly universally regarded as a severe defeat, but it is collapsing beneath the 165 seats won in 1997 that would indicate the worst result for the party in living memory. Returning fewer than 156 MPs, or 151 if you wish to be proportional to the size of the Commons, would replace 1906 as the party’s worst result since it was founded in 1834; this should be the expectation according to most prediction models. Surpassing the 106 seats (proportionally 123) won by the Tory faction in the 1754 election would truly be hitting rock bottom, while not being able to top the 52 seats clung on to by the remnants of Labour in the 1931 election would signify a wipeout.
The More in Common projection has the Tories winning 180 seats this time. Find Out Now has them down to 66.
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Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, has been on paddleboards, rollercoasters and assault courses during the election campaign, but today he’s in Hampshire, where he has been engaged in gentler pursuits. He has been playing quoits at a farm, where he has been campaigning with the Lib Dem candidate for Eastleigh.
Ed Davey and with the Lib Dem candidate for Eastleigh Liz Jarvis, playing a game of quoits during a visit to Crowd Hill Farm in Hampshire. Photograph: Andrew Matthews/PAEd Davey with Liz Jarvis. Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty ImagesShare
Kwasi Kwarteng, the Tory former chancellor, has said that his party should fight a “more aggressive” campaign against Labour.
As the Telegraph reports, Kwarteng told GB News:
I think we need to fight a more aggressive campaign. I think Keir Starmer is a man of the left, very much so, and he’s obviously trying to pretend or portray himself as something more akin to a centrist politician.
And I think it’s the job of the Conservative party, and particularly the prime minister, who is going head-to-head with Sir Keir, to point that out.
And I’m not sure we’re being forensic enough in terms of saying, this man is odds-on likely, given the polls, to be prime minister, have we given him enough scrutiny, have we looked hard enough at his record to make sure that we’re happy with him? And I think people would be very surprised to hear some of the positions.
This argument is identical to the one being made by senior Tories quoted anonymously in a Times story published yesterday saying Sunak was being urged to “go for the jugular”.
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Ruth Davidson urges Scots to use election to end SNP demands for independence ‘once and for all’
Libby Brooks
Here’s another reminder of how different the election campaign is north and south of the border. As Boris Johnson is drafted in to write to “red wall” voters in England, in Scotland the former Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson has stepped in.
Writing in the Scottish Daily Mail this morning, Davidson took the Scottish Tory campaign back to its happy place, appealing to its pro-union base. She said:
This election is a huge opportunity for pro-UK voters. It is the chance we have been waiting for over the past decade. We can finally get rid of the SNP in seats up and down Scotland. We can end their demands for independence – for good.
We can finally move Scotland forward and get away from the divisive independence debate, once and for all.
The SNP are adamant July 4 will be their ‘independence day’. But you can make it the day Scotland is free of the SNP.
With the Tory’s campaign in Scotland rocked by Douglas Ross announcing last week that he would step down as leader after the election, this can be seen as an attempt to steady the course by one of the party’s most trusted senior figures and to return to winning territory. In the north, east and south of Scotland, the party enjoyed sustained success in offering a voice to Scotland’s centre-right unionists.
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Labour announces plan for 350 banking hubs in towns and villages in Britain
Labour is today promoting its plans to set up 350 banking hubs in towns and villages in Britain. In a news release describing the plan, it said:
Banking hubs are bricks and mortar, face-to-face banking services that provide access to cash withdrawals, cash deposits and banking advice and support.
Funded by the major banks, they are run by Cash Access UK and the Post Office. They allow customers from more than a dozen different banks and building societies to access face-to-face banking services on the high street.
Labour announces today that it will give new powers to the regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), and strengthen regulation to support LINK, the UK’s largest cash machine network, to proactively source locations for new banking hubs.
Speaking about the plan on ITV’s Good Morning Britain this morning, Jonathan Reynolds, the shadow business secretary, said:
What we are doing here is making sure we’re not in a situation that we do have, I’m afraid, in lots of towns where there is simply no high street access to cash. If you’re a smaller business that is still important, being able to deposit cash takings that you have got.
I think it’s a fair offer to the banks. I think it’s part of our wider plan to grow the economy in every part of the country to show we can do things differently to the last 14 years.
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The Conservative party has sent out this response to the Keir Starmer LBC phone-in, from Laura Trott, the chief secretary to the Treasury. She claimed:
After repeated questioning, Keir Starmer has confirmed higher council tax and other tax rises are on the cards for pensioners and families if Labour win.
It’s worrying that Keir Starmer won’t come clean about how much money a Labour government will raid from families – especially as Labour will be unaccountable after it locks itself into government for a generation by rigging the system through bringing in votes at 16.
The Conservative party is now routinely claiming that, if Labour does not explicity rule out a tax rise, that amounts to confirmation it will happen. These assertions are not true.
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Tories expected to target voters with letters signed by Boris Johnson
The Conservatives will turn to Boris Johnson in an attempt to boost their faltering election campaign, according to reports. Ben Quinn has the story.
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Philip Cowley, a politics professor, says that if the Tories think Labour will entrench itself in power (see 8.53am) by giving the vote to 16 and 17-year-olds (who are normally more leftwing than older voters), they are wrong.
There are few people less keen on votes at 16 than me.
While it may be true that one of the attractions of it for non-Conservative politicians is that they think they will gain votes, the electoral impact will be extremely marginal.
The numbers involved are just tiny. https://t.co/N6kqBWSPi8
— Philip Cowley (@philipjcowley) June 18, 2024
There are few people less keen on votes at 16 than me.
While it may be true that one of the attractions of it for non-Conservative politicians is that they think they will gain votes, the electoral impact will be extremely marginal.
The numbers involved are just tiny
It’s a tiny cohort, many of whom won’t vote.
I’d add that while *right now*, those extra votes may well be pro-Labour, I am less sure they will be quite so keen on Labour after one (let alone two) terms in office.
If, by 2028,say, Labour finds itself on the wrong end of lots of disillusioned 16 and 17 year olds, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.
I’d add that a Facebook group of A level politics teachers I am a member of recently had a discussion about how well Reform were doing in their mock elections…
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Starmer’s LBC phone-in – snap verdict
Nick Ferrari was responsible for perhaps the most damaging interview Keir Starmer has ever given as Labour leader, the one soon after the Israel-Hamas war started where Starmer seemed to say Israel was entitled to cut water and power supplies to Gaza. (Starmer says that is not what he meant to say, and that his message was not clear because he and Ferrari were talking over each other at one point.) Phone-ins can be perilous during an election campaign, but there was nothing Ferrari, or any of his callers, said this time that sunk the Labour leader. Overall, Starmer came out pretty well.
On two issues, he was particulary evasive. Starmer is determined not to admit publicly that anything he said about Jeremy Corbyn when he served in his shadow cabinet was a lie, and he wriggled repeatedly when asked if he would have served in a Corbyn cabinet. (See 9.34am.) It was not very dignified, and it served as a reminder of how other politicians can bat away questions like this more easily. Last week, faced with a similar hypothetical question, David Cameron brushed it off quoting Gino D’Acampo. “If my mother had wheels she’d be a bicycle, I don’t answer questions beginning with the word if,” he said. Starmer might have been better using a line like this. But does the Corbyn issue really matter that much? Voters know that when MPs praise their leaders during election campaigns, they are not always being 100% sincere, and no one following politics at the time ever believed that Starmer was a arch-Corbynista.
Second, Starmer refused to rule out council tax going up, in such a way as to suggest that he was not being candid. (See 9.23am.) This was odd, partly because council tax goes up in cash terms every year anyway for most people, but mainly because Labour seemed to deliberately shift its position on this yesterday, when Jonathan Ashworth said “we are not going to do council tax rebanding”. Was Starmer just not sure what the new line was? It is not clear.
The Telegraph website is currently leading on “Starmer suggests he would have served in Corbyn government”, but neither of his evasions felt like big campaign stories and what was perhaps most striking was just how confident he sounded. He admitted for the first time that he performance in the first debate had not been great (see 10.02am), he was quite withering about the Tories’ latest scaremongering (see 9.55am) and he seemed to be making a negotiating pitch to the BMA junior doctors’ committee, urging them to call off strike action pending talks with a Labour government next month (see 9.19am). In other words, he sounded like he knows he will be the next prime minister. All the evidence suggests he’s right.
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Updated at 12.11 BST
Starmer rules out Labour imposing levy on Premier League transfers, after shadow minister floats idea
Just before the LBC phone-in ended, Keir Starmer was asked about comments from Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow culture minister, who said yesterday Labour was considering reviving plans for a levy on Premier League football transfers, to raise funds for less wealth clubs. Aletha Adu has the story here.
Asked if that meant Labour would impose a 10% transfer levy, which would affect clubs like Arsenal (which Starmer supports), Starmer replied:
No, no, let me just kill that one. We’re not looking at that.
He said Debbonaire was right to say Labour would look at the proposals from the Tracey Crouch review of football governance, but this idea would not be considered. “That isn’t part of it,” he said.
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Q: Is there anything you admire about Rishi Sunak?
Yes, Starmer says. He says he appreciated the way Sunak called him on the day he became PM so that they could discuss the need for cooperation on matters of national interest, like security. Sunak did not need to make the time for a call that day, he says.
And that’s it. The Q&A is over.
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Read the full story on www.theguardian.com
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2024/jun/18/labour-conservatives-tories-general-election-keir-starmer-rishi-sunak-politics-live