General election live: Sunak refuses to say if aide who bet on election date knew about timing | Politics

In his TV interview Rishi Sunak also said the publication of the Labour manifesto showed that there was a “crystal clear” choice for people on tax. He said:

There’s a clear choice at this election. We published a manifesto that’s going to cut taxes for people in this country and the Labour manifesto that was published today made it clear that taxes are going to rise.

Multiple independent sources [eg, see 4.42pm] demonstrate that the tax burden under Labour will rise to the highest levels in history.

And in contrast, if I’m reelected, we will cut taxes for people at every stage of their life, cutting taxes for people at work, cutting tax for people who are self employed, cutting tax for people buying their first home, cutting tax for pensioners and cutting taxes for families. That’s the type of country I want to lead.

Rishi Sunak has refused to say whether Craig Williams, his parliamentary private secretary, knew that Sunak was going to call a July election when he placed a bet on that, three days before the announcement.

In an interview with the BBC’s Vicki Young at the G7 summit in Italy, asked if Sunak knew that announcement was coming, Sunak replied:

It was very disappointing news. You will have seen Craig Williams say that it was a huge error of judgment.

Now there’s a independent inquiry that is ongoing, which is necessarily confidential, as well as independent, and you’ll appreciate that, given that, it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to comment while that’s ongoing.

When it was put to him that he could easily clear the matter up by answering the question now, Sunak repeated the point about wanting to let the inquiry proceed. Asked if he had spoken to the inquiry, he said it would not be right to comment.

In its response to the Labour manifesto, the Resolution Foundation, a thinktank focused on the needs of low and medium-income families, praises the plans to boost employment rights, saying they amount to “the biggest shake-up of the workplace in a generation, with the laudable aim of boosting the quality of work”.

But it says “this boldness contrasts with a politically cautious approach to the public finances, which means a future Labour chancellor could be left implementing significant tax rises and public service cuts over the next parliament.”

It says that that, under these plans, and mostly because of future tax rises already baked in under the Tories, the tax burden will rise to its highest level ever. It says:

Labour’s plans to raise taxes by £8.5bn a year over the next parliament, coupled with £23.5bn post-election tax rises announced by Jeremy Hunt in the last parliament, would leave the UK’s tax-to-GDP ratio rising from 36.5% in 2024-25 to 37.4% to 2028-29 – equivalent to a tax rise of £1,100 a year per household (in 2028-29 prices) – with the UK’s tax take reaching its highest on record.

This scale of this rising tax take in the next parliament would be modest compared to the last parliament (which rose by 3.3 percentage points) but comparable in scale to the 2001-05 parliament (when it also rose by 0.9 percentage points).

The decision to accept the continuation of the six-year freeze to tax thresholds would see the personal tax bills of a typical employee earning £30,000 rise by £180 a year by 2027-28.

And it says that Labour would oversee spending cuts in some departments because it is largely accepting government plans. It says:

Labour’s modest pledges to increase spending largely lie in departments that are already protected, such as education and health and social care. This means that an incoming Labour government would still need to deliver around £18bn of cuts to unprotected departments such as Transport, Justice and the Home Office. Neither party has said anything on how they intend to deliver these extremely challenging cuts.

The Conservatives has also issued a press release claiming that the Labour manifesto shows Keir Starmer will “unravel Brexit”.

This is based on the pledge in the document to “seek to negotiate a veterinary agreement to prevent unnecessary border checks and help tackle the cost of food”.

The Tories says EU officials have briefed that a deal of this kind would require the UK to accept oversight by the European court of justice. In their news release they quote Steve Barclay, the environment secretary, saying:

Today Keir Starmer has confirmed what he’s been hinting at for months – that Labour would once again make the UK a rule-taker from Brussels.

Others have argued that what is significant about the manifesto is how limited it is in terms of its ambition for a closer relationship with the EU. This is from Timothy Garton Ash, the writer and Europe expert

Foreign policy part of Labour’s just-launched election manifesto. Hyper-cautious on Europe. It even repeats that ridiculous oxymoronic formula ‘make Brexit work’.

This is what the manifesto says about relations with the EU.

With Labour, Britain will stay outside of the EU. But to seize the opportunities ahead, we must make Brexit work. We will reset the relationship and seek to deepen ties with our European friends, neighbours and allies. That does not mean reopening the divisions of the past. There will be no return to the single market, the customs union, or freedom of movement.

Instead, Labour will work to improve the UK’s trade and investment relationship with the EU, by tearing down unnecessary barriers to trade. We will seek to negotiate a veterinary agreement to prevent unnecessary border checks and help tackle the cost of food; help our touring artists; and secure a mutual recognition agreement for professional qualifications to help open up markets for UK service exporters.

Labour will seek an ambitious new UK-EU security pact to strengthen cooperation on the threats we face. We will rebuild relationships with key European allies, including France and Germany, through increased defence and security cooperation. We will seek new bilateral agreements and closer working with Joint Expeditionary Force partners. This will strengthen Nato and keep Britain safe.

The Conservatives are calling the Labour policy document a “tax trap manifesto”. The party put out this statement in response from Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor.

This is Labour’s tax trap manifesto which contains only tax rises and no tax cuts. Under Labour’s published plans, taxes will rise to levels never before seen in this country.

But that’s only the tax rises they’re telling you about – it doesn’t include the £2,094 of tax rises they’ll need to fill their £38.5bn unfunded spending commitments.

So what’s most important is not what’s in Labour’s manifesto, but it’s what they have kept out of it. They are refusing to rule out taxing your job, your home, your pension, your car, your business and they think they can get away with it without anyone holding them to account. Be under no illusion, from cradle to grave you will pay more taxes under Labour.

Labour has described the claim that it would need to raise taxes by around £2,000, over four years, because of unfunded spending commitments as nonsense.

Welfare experts have said that the proposals in Labour’s manifesto do not go far enough to tackle child poverty.

This is what the manifesto says about child poverty.

Child poverty has gone up by 700,000 under the Conservatives, with over four million children now growing up in a low-income family. Last year, a million children experienced destitution. This not only harms children’s lives now, it damages their future prospects, and holds back our economic potential as a country. Labour will develop an ambitious strategy to reduce child poverty. We will work with the voluntary sector, faith organisations, trade unions, business, devolved and local government, and communities to bring about change.

We will take initial steps to confront poverty by introducing free breakfast clubs in every primary school, protecting renters from arbitrary eviction, slashing fuel poverty, banning exploitative zero hours contracts, and improving support to help people get into good work.

Alison Garnham, chief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group, said:

A child poverty strategy is imperative and extremely welcome but its first action point has to be abolishing the two-child limit which more than any other policy has driven child poverty to record levels.

There needs to be some real ambition on family incomes and real change won’t come for the four million children in poverty until the two- child limit and benefit cap are scrapped and the rate of child benefit is increased.

Paul Carberry, chief executive of Action for Children, said:

Labour’s proposed strategy to reduce child poverty won’t get off the ground until they ditch the cruel two-child limit and benefit cap policies. We urge them to think again on this.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a thinktank, also argued that Labour’s welfare proposals were lacking in ambition. It posted these on X.

This General Election, it’s essential that we know what parties will do to tackle hardship if they are elected.

We have been looking at the party manifestos and considering whether there is a plan.

Today’s Labour manifesto acknowledges the million children who experienced destitution. They have promised:

– A child poverty strategy

– A homelessness strategy built alongside civil society

– To end the “mass dependence on emergency food parcels”

They propose “initial steps to confront poverty” such as:

– Protecting renters from arbitrary eviction

– Free breakfast clubs in every primary school

– Banning exploitative zero hours contracts But… (3/7)

What we haven’t seen today is any detail on:

– How Universal Credit could be used to tackle poverty

– What the plan is to end dependence on food parcels

Advertisements

– Local crisis support – How to support people with no recourse to public funds

This manifesto includes some steps to address poverty, but it falls short of the clear urgent action plan needed to tackle hardship for millions going without essentials.

The urgency of the situation requires rapid action.(5/7)

The missing details need to be filled in quickly, without them these plans do not match the scale of the challenge when we have almost four million people experiencing destitution in a single year. (6/7)

Whoever is in government from July 5th needs to take action and accept moral responsibility for supporting people in severe hardship through the coming weeks and months. To read more about the policies that would shift the dial on hardship: https://jrf.org.uk/deep-poverty-and-destitution/designing-out-hardship-and-destitution… (7/7)

The Liberal Democrats have called for a Cabinet Office inquiry into how Craig Williams, and Tory candidate and aide to Rishi Sunak, came to put a bet on a July election just three days before the date was announced.

Lib Dem deputy leader Daisy Cooper said:

Rishi Sunak must stop being so weak and call a Cabinet Office inquiry into this latest scandal.

This inquiry is needed to get to the bottom of who knew what when, and uncover whether Craig Williams knew the election date at the time the bet was placed.

The Conservative party has been mired in endless sleaze and scandal for years and the British people are sick to their back teeth with it.

And Rhun ap Iorwerth, leader of Plaid Cymru, said there were now “very serious questions” around Williams continuing as the Tory candidate in Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr. Speaking to the press after his party’s manifesto launch, he said:

I don’t know how quickly that investigation will be concluded, but clearly there are very, very serious questions about the propriety of him remaining as a candidate at all in this election.

The Survation MRP poll suggests Labour is on course to beat Williams in Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr, by 37% to 28%.

General elections normally end with the resignation of one or more of the party leaders, but in this campaign we’ve already had a resignation announcement, from Douglas Ross, the Scottish Tory leader. Libby Brooks has written a good analysis of what this means, and she says it could hasten the Scottish party’s decision to break away from its London counterpart. Here is an extract.

[Ross’s] actions were so apparently self-serving and clumsily executed that even Ruth Davidson, the leader credited with reviving Tory fortunes in Scotland in the 2010s, and normally scrupulous in leaving her successors be, was moved to observe that “part of the job is to take the punches. And that’s what leadership kind of is.”

But it is an idea from Davidson’s election contest that may yet yield what some believe to be a silver lining: should the Scottish Tories split from the UK party entirely – particularly given its likely rightward tack after its widely anticipated defeat on 4 July – and reform as a new centre-right party more attuned to the Scottish political landscape?

Proposed by Murdo Fraser, the party veteran who stood against her in 2011, and rejected by members at the time, the idea has “never been more pertinent,” says Andy McIver, former Scottish Conservative adviser, podcaster and consultant who helped Fraser hone his pitch.

And here is Libby’s article.

For a more positive take on the Labour manifesto, read this from Will Hutton, the writer, intellectual and Observer columnist. He says Keir Starmer’s manifesto could be more transformative than Attlee’s in 1945.

The Labour manifesto in its unassuming , unsung but purposeful way is as radical and potentially more enduringly transformative than Labour’s in 1945. Everyone under-rated Attlee, his ambition and capacity to bring it off. They are doing the same with Starmer.

Ed Balls has described Labour’s manifesto as a “straitjacket” that will make Keir Starmer’s first year in office “very difficult”.

Speaking on his Political Currency podcast, which he co-hosts with George Osborne, Ball, who was Gordon Brown’s most important adviser when Brown was shadow chancellor and then chancellor, and who served as shadow chancellor himself under Ed Miliband, said:

If you are a Labour government, the one thing you cannot afford to do is break your promises on the macro-economy and your kind of tax pledges. You can’t afford to do a Liz Truss.

But I think people will look back on this manifesto – which is now seen as cautious and careful – and think of it as being something which was very constraining, and a potentially risky thing to do for Labour, because this manifesto is absolutely boxing Labour in.

It will be seen as a straitjacket, with tough fiscal rules and limits on borrowing, big commitments not to raise income tax or VAT or national insurance ….

For Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves there are huge expectations, no money, little room for manoeuvre, inherited plans which are very tight, and an economy which isn’t growing. So I think that creates a big set of expectations and that is the consequence of the manifesto strategy. This manifesto makes the first year in government for Labour very difficult.

Here is the video of Joe Pike from the BBC doing a very good job doorstepping the Tory candidate Craig Williams, who is being investigated over allegations he took advantage of insider information when he placed a bet on Rishi Sunak calling an election in June. It was Pike who got Williams to say this was a “huge error of judgment”. (See 1.11pm.)

Experts at the Institute for Government thinktank have also said the plans in the Labour manifesto are not enough to avert the cuts facing some public services after the election.

These are from Gemma Tetlow, the IfG’s chief economist.

Given that the government has not been upfront about the implausibility of its spending plans beyond this year, it’s not surprising that the opposition has not been either but the electorate are in for a nasty shock whoever wins the election

And these are from Nick Davies, programme director at the IfG.

My main takeaway is that the Labour manifesto (unsurprisingly for an opposition party) does a much better job acknowledging the scale of the challenges facing public services. BUT the party doesn’t yet have solutions that are equal to the task

Oppositions understandably only focus on detailed policy development once they are in government and the manifesto announces reviews on critical issues like teacher retention and sentencing, but it should have done more to prepare the public for the difficult trade-offs coming

If Labour win they’ll need to make unpopular decisions quite quickly eg to deal with full prisons. But there’s not much in the manifesto to give them a mandate for these. Though, based on current polling, they might feel they’ll have a big enough majority for it not to matter…

The Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank says Labour’s manifesto does not contain the sort of spending plans needed to protect public services from future cuts.

In an analysis of the manifesto plans, written by the its director Paul Johnson, the IFS says Labour’s focus on growth is welcome and that some of its plans are “better than a shopping list of half-baked policy announcements” (an apparent reference to the Tory manifesto). But the IFS goes on:

But delivering genuine change will almost certainly also require putting actual resources on the table. And Labour’s manifesto offers no indication that there is a plan for where the money would come from to finance this.

Here is an excerpt.

This was not a manifesto for those looking for big numbers. The public service spending increases promised in the “costings” table are tiny, going on trivial. The tax rises, beyond the inevitable reduced tax avoidance, even more trivial. The biggest commitment, to the much vaunted “green prosperity plan”, comes in at no more than £5bn a year, funded in part by borrowing and in part by “a windfall tax on the oil and gas giants”.

Beyond that, almost nothing in the way of definite promises on spending despite Labour diagnosing deep-seated problems across child poverty, homelessness, higher education funding, adult social care, local government finances, pensions and much more besides. Definite promises though not to do things. Not to have debt rising at the end of the forecast. Not to increase tax on working people. Not to increase rates of income tax, National Insurance, VAT or corporation tax.

One public service where there are big promises is on the NHS. Labour has recommitted to the workforce plan, to getting rid of all waiting times more than 18 weeks, and to more hospitals. Big promises, but that will require big spending too.

All that will leave Labour with a problem. On current forecasts, and especially with an extra £17.5bn borrowing over five years to fund the green prosperity plan, this leaves literally no room – within the fiscal rule that Labour has signed up to – for any more spending than planned by the current government. And those plans do involve cuts both to investment spending and to spending on unprotected public services. Yet Sir Keir Starmer effectively ruled out such cuts. How they will square the circle in government we do not know.

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are normally happy to be accused of being fiscally cautious. But if the IFS, which has never been seen as a bastion of leftism, is more in favour of putting up taxes than Labour, then some in the party might start to worry.

Dealing with hospital lists will be a “profound politcal challenge”, Dr Sarah Scobie, acting director of research at the Nuffield Trust thinktank, said today.

She was speaking after the latest NHS England figures showed the waiting list going up again, for the first time in seven months. (See 9.56am.)

Scobie said promised progress on reducing the waitling list had “stalled”. She went on:

It is hard to overstate what a profound political challenge the huge waiting list has become now.

All the political parties recognise the importance of bringing down waiting times but this huge backlog is going to be a constant spectre for the next government, whoever gets the keys to No 10 in July.

Truly tackling it effectively will be something that takes time, investment, patience, and hard work – and it’s likely that on current plans it will be extremely stretching to eliminate it before the end of this decade.