Talk of Labour supermajority is ‘nonsense’, party’s Scotland leader says
We have some more quotes from Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, who has been speaking on the BBC’s Sunday Show.
Earlier, he reiterated his view that it is “for the Scottish people” to decide on independence and that another referendum would require support for separation to become the “settled will” of the people (see post at 12.29 for details).
Sarwar has now described talk of a Labour “supermajority” as “nonsense”, saying that “not a single vote has been cast”.
He added:
We still don’t have end results from this election and every vote for Scottish Labour in this election is of course to make sure we get rid of the Tories, but it’s also to put Scotland at the heart of a Labour government and to deliver the change that this country needs.
Earlier this month, the defence secretary, Grant Shapps, signalled a change in Tory electoral strategy by saying the Conservatives were fighting to prevent Keir Starmer winning a “supermajority” even bigger than Labour’s 1997 landslide victory.
In the face of dire polls for the party, the unusual messaging seemed to be the Tories conceding that defeat is inevitable and instead pleading with its core voters to ensure there is still a substantial group of Conservative MPs in parliament.
Labour has sought to guard against complacency, with a leaked memo from campaign chief Pat McFadden – as reported by the BBC – talking up the number of undecided or uncertain voters across the UK.
Key events
Bookmakers asked for details of bets of £20 or more placed on election date after Sunak’s announcement – Sky News
Jon Craig, Sky News’ chief political correspondent, understands that investigators have written to leading bookmakers asking for details of bets of £20 or more on the election date (4 July) within days of Rishi Sunak announcing it on 22 May. Craig also has been told that “many more people” than the four Conservatives already identified are being investigated by the Gambling Commission in potential connection to bets placed on the date of the general election. This backs up Robert Peston’s reporting mentioned in this post.
The Sky News report reads:
Many more people than the leading Tories already identified are being investigated by the gambling regulator in relation to bets on the date of the general election, Sky News understands.
And in a major new development, the watchdog has widened its inquiries to investigate whether people with inside knowledge may have asked a third party to place a bet for them.
Sky News also understands that investigators have written to leading bookmakers asking for details of bets of £20 or more on the election date within days of Rishi Sunak announcing it on 22 May.
Former Tory minister is ‘deeply hurt and rather angry’ at betting allegations
The former justice secretary Robert Buckland has said he is “deeply hurt and rather angry” at the growing Tory betting scandal after it emerged the party’s chief data officer is being looked into by the Gambling Commission over bets allegedly placed on the date of the general election. James Mason is the fourth party figure subject to an investigation by the gambling watchdog.
“I’m deeply, deeply hurt and rather angry that this has happened in the middle of a campaign that is tough enough without things like this to complicate it further,” Buckland, the Conservative candidate for Swindon South, told LBC’s Lewis Goodall.
Buckland said the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, should suspend the people involved while investigations are ongoing, and that he expects “higher standards” within the Conservative party and more broadly.
“You think the Prime Minister should suspend the people involved?”
“Yes I do.”Tory candidate Sir Robert Buckland makes his stance clear on the election betting scandal. pic.twitter.com/fF26ya8oTP
— LBC (@LBC) June 23, 2024
Lib Dems candidate Daisy Cooper has arrived in Harpenden in a tractor to help with canvassing in her local area.
Cooper, who is deputy leader of the party, told the crowds:
This is our chance to win the change that our country desperately needs. Day in, day out, people are working incredibly hard, they’re paying their taxes and yet they’re still struggling to make ends meet.
At the end of her speech, she said:
Our message is clear: a vote for the Liberal Democrats is a vote for a strong local champion …. A vote for the Liberal Democrats is a vote for a fair deal and a vote for the Liberal Democrats is a vote to deliver the change this country so desperately needs.
When asked about the Tory gambling scandal, Cooper told the PA news agency: “I think right across the country, people are sick to the back teeth of conservative governments in Westminster, and the SNP government in Scotland as well, being mired in scandal and sleaze.”
She added:
Liberal Democrats would make sure that the ministerial code is put on an independent footing, we would make sure that there was an independent ethics adviser as well. Fundamentally, I think the first step in terms of getting rid of the sleazy scandal in public life has to be getting rid of the Conservatives and getting them out of office on the Fourth of July.”
The latest Opinium poll for the Observer puts the Lib Dems at 12% (unchanged), while the Greens have enjoyed a surge and now stand at 9%. The poll gives Labour a 20-point lead over the Tories. It shows Reform only four points behind the Conservatives, on 16% of the vote.
Douglas Ross, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives and a controversial candidate in this election, has said he is concerned that traditional Tory voters opting for Reform could hand seats to the SNP:
What [Farage] risks doing here is letting the SNP in.
Because in key seats, a vote for Reform will simply let the SNP in the back door and I think people are becoming more and more aware of that, and the risk that they will wake up on 5 July with an SNP politician because Reform votes have allowed that to happen …
There’s not a single opinion poll that has got the Reform party anywhere close to winning a seat anywhere in Scotland, but they can help the SNP get in.
Stella Creasy, the Labour candidate in Walthamstow, has shared photos of her office that she says was vandalised last night.
“Message to whoever attacked my office last night. You don’t intimidate me and you don’t belong in the political process,” she wrote on X.
Message to whoever attacked my office last night. You don’t intimidate me and you don’t belong in the political process. Same as those circulating malicious and false leaflets. Police already on this to find you – will press for the strongest penalties for such an anti 1/2 pic.twitter.com/QfLjcohbzA
— stellacreasy (@stellacreasy) June 23, 2024
Creasy has said previously that harassment towards political representatives was increasingly normalised.
She has said the abuse she has faced as an MP, including rape and death threats, were indicative of a serious problem that risked undermining democracy.
John Harris
John Harris writes in his column today about his mistrust of polls:
Elections ought to represent potential moments of reckoning, when we all talk about the state of the country and its future, the struggles and travails people go through, and the different visions of the future they have. If the people meant to lead that conversation are hyperventilating about uniform swings, representative samples and which polling company is going to be proved right, those things get lost.
There is also an even bigger risk. As the uneasy public mood proves, this is an age of profound political alienation, when nasty populists can too easily accuse the mainstream media and Westminster politicians of being part of a remote elite whose members are all the same. Because it robs politics of meaningful substance, polling hysteria gives that kind of talk the ring of truth. So does the banal framing of the election as a wholly foregone conclusion.
Read more here:
Michael Savage
Labour will create a watchdog with “real teeth” that has the power to prosecute and fine companies that breach the rights of their employees as part of its plans to strengthen workers’ rights.
Angela Rayner, the party’s deputy leader, told the Observer that she would create a new body, the Fair Work Agency, to oversee her proposals. She said that millions of workers could be losing out on basic rights as a result of underenforcement.
The agency would have “real teeth”, with the power to levy fines, inspect workplaces, lodge civil proceedings and bring forward prosecutions. It would enforce rights like holiday pay, sick pay and parental rights, which Labour has pledged to strengthen.
Rayner said:
Under the Tories, the enforcement of workers’ rights is fragmented, overburdened and overstretched. That’s bad for workers, for businesses and for our economy.
Allowing those who don’t even pay the national minimum wage off scot-free only encourages a race to the bottom. Employers who want to do right by their workers are being badly let down, finding themselves undercut by those who refuse to play by the rules.
Gambling Commission investigating ‘many’ other individuals who bet on general election – ITV News
The Gambling Commission is investigating “many” other individuals who bet on the July election, ITV News’ political editor, Robert Peston, said.
The Gambling Commission has informed Nick Mason, the Tories’ chief data officer, that he is part of its inquiry into bets on the timing of the election, the Sunday Times reported. The Conservative party confirmed that Mason had taken a leave of absence.
Mason is the fourth confirmed Conservative figure to be facing an investigation in a growing gambling scandal that has engulfed the party during the election campaign.
Peston wrote in a tweet on X:
After the Tory candidate and ex PPS to Sunak, Craig Williams, placed a £100 bet on a July election, the booking giant Entain, owner of Ladbrokes and Corals, notified the commission.
Entain made the disclosure to the commission because Williams as an MP (before parliament was dissolved) was classified as a Politically Exposed Person in relevant law. The commission then wrote to all the gambling companies requesting details of any individual who had bet £20 or more on that July election within days of the PM calling it on 22 May.
The commission then wrote to all the gambling companies requesting details of any individual who had bet £20 or more on that July election within days of the PM calling it on 22 May.
This initial trawl yielded what industry sources say were “many names” and since then the commission has been combing through the internet and social media to establish who they are and whether they have links to the Conservative party or government.
The Gambling Commission is investigating “many” other individuals who bet on the July election, I understand, in a widening scandal that is undermining Rishi Sunak’s general election campaign.
After the Tory candidate and ex PPS to Sunak, Craig Williams, placed a £100 bet on a…
— Robert Peston (@Peston) June 23, 2024
On the BBC’s Sunday Show, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar reiterated his view that it is “for the Scottish people” to decide on independence and that another referendum would require support for separation to become the “settled will” of the people.
But Sarwar – much like other politicians on both sides of the constitutional divide – refused to say what support would be required or how it could be quantified.
He added:
We’ve been really clear in this election campaign. I don’t support independence, I don’t support a referendum, there isn’t a consistent majority for independence, there isn’t a majority for a referendum.
The Scottish Labour manifesto largely mirrors UK Labour pledges on growing the economy, cutting NHS waiting lists and more support for young people set out by Keir Starmer. Scottish Labour is poised for huge gains north of the border at the general election, according to polls.
Unite’s general secretary, Sharon Graham, said she does not agree with Labour’s fiscal rules and called on the party to borrow to invest. Unite is Labour’s largest union donor but it has refused to endorse the party’s general election manifesto.
Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has promised to retain the Tories’ commitment that debt as a proportion of GDP must be on track to fall in five years if Labour win the election on 4 July.
She has ruled out borrowing to fund day-to-day spending, saying her focus will be on reforms to grow the economy. Graham has claimed other countries with growing economies have a larger debt-to-GDP ratio than the UK, “so there is wriggle room”.
Graham told Sky’s Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips programme:
If you look at other countries – in France, their debt to GDP is 112%. In America, where the economy’s growing, it’s 130% debt to GDP. Ours is around about 99%. We have wriggle room. Give Britain a break.
These people that are out there in communities and workers, they are literally hurting beyond anything you could comprehend and what we need is the straitjacket off a little bit, get some wriggle room there.
Borrowing to invest is not the same as other borrowing. It’s borrowing to invest. It’s part of our balance sheet. Let’s get that done and if you don’t do that, we’ll be waiting too long.
Relations with Unite have been strained ever since Starmer replaced Jeremy Corbyn as party leader in 2020.
Support for a united Ireland has not advanced one step in the quarter century since Northern Ireland’s peace agreement, the leader of the DUP has told the PA news agency.
Some polls have suggested otherwise. A Lucid Talk/Sunday Times survey last year, for example, showed that 57% of 18 to 24-year-olds in Northern Ireland would vote “yes” to reunifying Ireland if a border poll were held.
The Press Association has this report:
However, Gavin Robinson said unionists could not be complacent about the maintenance of the Union, as he acknowledged the need to convince the growing number of non-aligned middle ground voters in Northern Ireland of the case for the constitutional status quo.
In a pre-election interview with the PA news agency, Mr Robinson also dismissed suggestions his party has recently performed a U-turn on its endorsement of the UK government deal on post-Brexit trade barriers that in January persuaded the DUP to drop its two-year protest blockade on powersharing at Stormont and return to devolution.
Countering the accusations of flip-flopping levelled by political rivals, he argued that the DUP had never claimed the government’s Safeguarding the Union command paper had resolved all the issues around checks and restrictions on goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland.
He insisted he had been consistent in characterising the deal as having made some progress to address his party’s concerns over trade and sovereignty, but that more work was still required on outstanding issues.
Mr Robinson found himself unexpectedly elevated to the party leadership, initially on an interim basis, when his predecessor Sir Jeffrey Donaldson stood down in March after being charged with historical sexual offences.
Donaldson’s case is now before the courts, and he has indicated he will contest all 11 charges facing him.
The barrister turned politician, who is hoping to hold off a challenge from Alliance party leader Naomi Long to retain his parliamentary seat in East Belfast, said being thrust into the leadership role in such circumstances had created a “new dynamic” in his professional and personal life.
In his interview with PA, Mr Robinson offered his view on the relative strength of the union between Great Britain and Northern Ireland – given the turbulence created by Brexit and intensifying calls from within nationalism for a border poll.
“The biggest threat to the Union in the last number of years has not been in Northern Ireland. It’s been outside Northern Ireland. And yet that is settled, you can see support for independence in Scotland dissipating. And, so, I think there’s a strong and positive future for the Union in 50 years and beyond,” he said.
Mr Robinson added: “I don’t think there is any complacency at all, there’s always a danger if you were to take your eye off the ball, but that’s not what we present.
“I think there’s obviously a difference between political unionism and those who are pro-Union, there is a difference with that. And there’s a burgeoning centre that don’t think every day about the constitutional question but are pleased and content to be in the Union, recognise that the Union works for them and though the last number of years have been politically fractious for a whole host of reasons, that’s not our focus – our focus is about making sure that day and daily we can highlight the benefits of being in the United Kingdom and strengthen and grow these bonds.”
Tory MPs paid £100,000 of public funds to party’s in-house web designers
Jessica Elgot
Jessica Elgot is the Guardian’s deputy political editor
More than 120 Conservative MPs, including Jeremy Hunt, Liz Truss, Sajid Javid and Gillian Keegan, paid £100,000 of taxpayers’ money to the Conservatives’ in-house web design services, it can be revealed.
The MPs used the Bluetree website service to design their websites. When billed by Bluetree, they would pay for the sites then claim back the costs from the public purse via expenses, prompting a complaint to parliament’s expenses watchdog about the practice.
Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) has denied Bluetree is wholly owned by the party and says it is a separate organisation, but repeatedly refused to deny the party receives income from the company, saying it has “commercial arrangements with CCHQ”.
Records show more than 330 invoices from Bluetree to Conservative MPs, including Hunt, Truss, Javid and Keegan, for web design services. Other high-profile Conservatives who have expensed services from Bluetree include Ben Wallace, Tobias Ellwood, Mark Francois and Helen Whately.
Plaid Cymru’s manifesto says Brexit was a “failure” and that it is in Wales’ best interest to rejoin the EU “at an appropriate point in time”.
In a post on X published this morning, the party said that Wales has been “shortchanged” by the Conservatives on post-Brexit funding, as it lists negative consequences of leaving the bloc, including higher charges for businesses and essential household items.
Despite being one of the biggest beneficiaries of EU funding, Wales voted leave by a majority of 52% to 48% in the 2016 referendum.
8 years on, and both Labour and Tories are deadly silent on the damage Brexit has caused:
👉 Higher costs of household essentials.
👉 Red tape and high charges for businesses
👉 Farmers undermined by post-Brexit trade deals allowing cheap imports to come to Wales.
👉 Freedom of…— Plaid Cymru 🏴 (@Plaid_Cymru) June 23, 2024
Plaid Cymru, led by Rhun ap Iorwerth, held four seats in Westminster in the last parliament and polling suggests it will take two or three seats on 4 July amid troubles for Welsh Labour in the Senedd after a vote of no confidence in the first minister, Vaughan Gething.
Libby Brooks
Libby Brooks is the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent
John Swinney’s first appearance on the Laura Kuenssberg Show as SNP leader was not a comfortable one.
With the front pages in Scotland this morning suggesting that his own office manager was involved in the growing row over misuse of MSPs expenses to buy stamps for general election leafletting, Swinney was forced to assure Kuenssberg that he was completely confidence that his party was not using any public money for general election campaigning.
The SNP is being investigated by Holyrood authorities over potential misuse of MSPs’ expenses, after an anonymous complaint was sent last week to the Scottish parliament’s presiding officer, Alison Johnstone, claiming that stamps paid for on expenses were passed to Westminster election candidates to use for posting leaflets to voters.
Dismissing a reference to the “stamp fairy” apparently made by one of his staff as a “humorous remark on a WhatsApp channel”, Swinney’s discomfort with these allegations are twofold. Firstly, they feed into wider voter distrust of the party, particularly around financial transparency, with the ongoing police investigation into alleged embezzlement of party funds and the row over the £11,000 iPad bill racked up by former health secretary Michael Matheson.
Secondly, it highlights how skint the party is currently. With falling membership and donations, it’s entirely plausible that staff could be scrabbling around for the price of a stamp.
But even more striking was the fact that the rest of the interview focused almost entirely on Swinney’s latest iteration of the SNP independence strategy, which seems to be that even if the party fails to secure a majority of Westminster seats at this election it still has a mandate to push for a second referendum because a pro-independence majority was voted in at Holyrood in 2021.
But SNP MPs have been talking for some time now about how voters feel the party has been too distracted by referendum process and insufficiently focused on their more immediate cost of living concerns.
The SNP were punished for exactly that last autumn’s Rutherglen byelection. So is it really wise to return to this un-square-able circle (Labour continue to refuse any talks on a referendum) so late in the campaign?
Sunak claims Starmer tried to ‘reverse’ the EU referendum vote
Rishi Sunak has attacked Keir Starmer over Brexit on the eighth anniversary of the vote to leave the EU.
The prime minister wrote on X that the Labour party leader tried to “reverse” the referendum vote, while the Conservatives “delivered on the will of the people”.
Starmer has insisted that while he wants a better trading relationship with the EU, Labour would not rejoin the bloc, the single market or the customs union if it comes to power next month.
8 years ago today, I proudly voted for Brexit.
While we delivered on the will of the people, Keir Starmer tried to reverse your vote.
That’s the difference between us.
— Rishi Sunak (@RishiSunak) June 23, 2024
“We’re not rejoining the EU, we’re not rejoining the single market or the customs union,” Starmer told reporters on Saturday. “That isn’t our plan. It never has been. I’ve never said that as leader of the Labour party, and it’s not in our manifesto.”
He was speaking at a campaign event in Vauxhall, south London, after Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary, who is seen as a likely Tory leadership contender, claimed he would reverse Brexit if he won power.
Labour’s manifesto – titled “It’s time for real change” – mentioned the word Brexit just once, compared with 21 times at the last election.
Starmer, who voted to remain in the EU, felt so strongly about the Brexit referendum result in June 2016 that he quit as a junior shadow minister under Jeremy Corbyn.
A few months later he returned to the Labour frontbench as shadow Brexit secretary and spent the next four years campaigning to mitigate the result. He campaigned against a no-deal Brexit and for a second referendum to give the people a “confirmatory vote” on any deal with Brussels. You can read more about Starmer’s positions on Brexit here.
Success for the SNP in the election would be ‘becoming the largest party in Scotland’, Swinney says
Scottish first minister John Swinney has been speaking to LBC. He said he would define success for the SNP in the general election as “becoming the largest party in Scotland”.
The SNP’s long-held policy – agreed at its conference last year – is that a majority of seats would be a mandate to begin negotiations with the UK government for another independence referendum.
It is possible for the SNP to be the largest party in Scotland but not have a majority of the 57 seats.
Swinney told LBC:
Becoming the largest party in Scotland, that would be my objective in this election. And that would be the largest party in terms of seats.
Swinney added that a message that “differentiates” it from the others running in this election by focus on austerity and the “huge damage of Brexit”.
After a huge swing to Labour in the past 18 months, the SNP is teetering on the brink. As Robert Ford, professor of political science at Manchester University, wrote in this analysis piece for the Observer, tiny local or national tremors in the final weeks will determine the fate of dozens of SNP MPs.
