General election live: Tory failure has left Labour with hard choices, says Streeting as he defends manifesto | Politics

Bim Afolami, economic secretary to the Treasury, was on the media round for the Conservatives this morning. The message he was keen to push was Tory claims that Labour would raise taxes to fund their manifesto policies, however he was repeatedly sidetracked by questions about Reform UK closing the gap on the Conservatives in some polling.

On Times Radio, asked if warnings that Labour might earn what had been described as a “super majority^*” showed the party was resigned to defeat, Afolami said “No, we have not accepted we’re going to lose this election, of course not, we’re fighting for every vote.”

On the topic of polling for Reform UK, he said:

Polls are polls, there’s pretty much a poll every single day in this campaign, there’ll be more, it’s one poll out of literally hundreds.

But what it does show is that there is significant difficulty of Keir Starmer having unchecked power to do all the things like tax your home, your job, your car and your pension if people vote Reform. A vote for Reform is a vote for Keir Starmer.

I completely understand if there are Conservative voters who feel frustrated or angry or they don’t feel at the moment that they want to support the Conservatives – and that’s what we’re fighting for, every single vote in this campaign.

On LBC he also faced questions about the relative performances of Reform UK and the Conservatives. Nick Ferrari put it to him “Just a few short years ago, your party enjoyed an extraordinary majority of some 80 seats in a general election. You’re now, it would appear, behind Reform. What makes your party so unpopular?”

Afolami said:

This parliament has seen unprecedented things. Covid, a once in a 100 year pandemic, the war on Ukraine quadrupling energy prices, leading to very high levels of inflation, and that’s had a huge impact on people’s lives. And it’s been very, very difficult for so many people in this country. But as I say, despite that difficulty we’ve come through it and the prime minister since coming in to stabilise the situation and now the economy is turning the corner.

Last month’s GDP figures flatlined after showing a meagre 0.4% growth the month before.

[^*There is no such thing as a “super majority” in the UK parliament.]

Paula Surridge is a professor of political sociology at the University of Bristol, and offers this analysis:

With Nigel Farage’s surprise takeover of Reform’s leadership at the start of the campaign, Reform poses an even greater challenge to the Conservatives in 2024. Its presence changes the dynamic of party competition in all types of seats, and as 2019 showed it does not need to win seats to damage the Tories.

Those on the left of British politics are well versed in this phenomenon: the left-leaning vote splitting over different parties and allowing the Conservatives to win seats they might not have won had the other parties worked together.

Electoral pacts and tactical voting advice have sought to reduce the impact of these splits on the left, and local election results suggest voters have become adept at working out how best to remove an incumbent Conservative.

This time, the right face these issues writ large. Even if parts of the right may be willing to countenance some kind of deal, voters choosing Reform UK are angry and disillusioned with the government and unlikely to vote tactically for Tories.

The combined impact of Reform increasing its vote share and standing candidates everywhere could be devastating for the Conservatives. As many as one in three voters who backed the Conservatives in 2019 are switching to Reform, according to some polling.

Read more of Paula Surridge’s analysis here: Reform’s split of right-leaning vote could prove devastating for Tories

Rishi Sunak has insisted that voting for Reform UK would be “handing Labour a blank cheque”, after he was asked about a YouGov poll that placed Nigel Farage’s party above his own.

Speaking to reporters from the G7 summit in Puglia, PA Media the prime minister said: “We are only halfway through this election, So I’m still fighting very hard for every vote.

“And what that poll shows is – the only poll that matters is the one on 4 July – but if that poll was replicated on 4 July, it would be handing Labour a blank cheque to tax everyone, tax their home, their pension, their car, their family, and I’ll be fighting very hard to make sure that doesn’t happen.

“And actually, when I’ve been out and about talking to people, they do understand that a vote for anyone who is not a Conservative candidate is just a vote to put Keir Starmer in No 10.”

Last night YouGov issued a poll that put Reform UK one point ahead of the Tories, which was, it noted, “still within the margin of error”. YouGov’s most recent seat projection suggested Reform UK was not on course to win any seats at the election.

The Guardian poll tracker, which is an average of polls over a moving 10-day period, has Sunak’s Conservatives on 23%, with Reform UK on 13%.

Appearing on BBC Breakfast this morning, Reform UK leader Farage said he hoped the party can “get through the electoral threshold” but declined to put a target on the number of seats he believes they can win.

Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting says rising NHS waiting lists in England have “blown a hole in Rishi Sunak’s credibility.

Asked on Sky News for his reaction to the latest figures, which show that NHS waiting lists in England have risen again slightly after falling for seven consecutive months from a record high, Streeting said:

I think they’ve blown a hole in Rishi Sunak credibility. You know, he said he would cut waiting lists when he became prime minister. They are now higher than they were when he became prime minister. And as we saw yesterday, they are rising.

The only way we’re going to get waiting lists down is if we have a Labour government that can deliver 40,000 more appointments every week. That’s a fully funded pledge in our manifesto. Double the number of scanners so that we can get the7.5 million on the waiting list down.

And also as we’re talking about today, an extra 8,500 mental health workers to get the more than a million people who are on mental health waiting lists for the treatment that they need and deserve as well.

He cited Labour’s track record when it was last in government, 14 years ago. He said “The last Labour government delivered the shortest waiting times and the highest patient satisfaction in the history of the NHS. We did it before, and with the support of the voters on 4 July, we can do it again.”

Health is a devolved matter, and the government in Westminster is only responsible for the NHS in England.

Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting has been pushed during the media round on the funding of Labour’s manifesto pledges. Labour have argued that the promises are fully costed and that there will be no tax rises for “working people”. The Conservatives have described the manifesto as a “tax trap”. Both parties are committed to the freezing of income tax thresholds over the next few years.

Streeting told viewers of Sky News that the party had made hard choices because if it got into power it would inherit public finances in a parlous state because of “the recklessness of the Conservative’s economic policies”. He continued:

We’ve spelled out fairer ways of funding those choices than the Conservatives, who’ve always sought to pick the pockets of working people as their first and last resort. And sothings like clamping down on tax avoidance, making sure that we close the remaining non-dom loopholes, a real windfall tax on the big oil and gas companies. When it comes to the burden of taxation on working people. We’ve been very clear we’re not going up top income tax, national insurance or VAT.

Streeting described Conservative manifesto promises as a “Liz Truss mini-budget on steroids”.

He said:

Rachel Reeves has been clear now as shadow chancellor. She wants to bring down the burden of taxation on working people. We’ve had to be careful about the promises we make in our manifesto. I want people to know that these are promises we can keep, and that the country can afford.

Of course we’d like to go further. But we’ve been very disciplined in terms of what goes into this manifesto so that people know it’s real change. It’s change they can believe in.

He continued:

I know there are millions of people out there at the moment who are undecided about how to vote at this general election, who are deeply cynical about politics and politicians.

And so what we’re trying to do as well as rebuilding our economy and rebuilding our public services, we are going to have to work very hard to rebuild trust in politics itself.