Starmer: big Labour majority would be ‘better for the country’
Keir Starmer has said a big majority would be “better for the country”, as the Tories continue to urge voters to proceed with caution and not hand Labour a “blank cheque”.
In an interview with The Times, Starmer said he needed a “strong mandate” to reform the planning system and improve the economy.
Asked if he was saying the bigger a majority, the better, he told the newspaper: “Better for the country. Because it means we can roll up our sleeves and get on with the change we need.”
Key events
Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho has echoed Rishi Sunak’s claim that just 130,000 voters could prevent a Labour landslide.
She told LBC Radio:
It’s never over ‘till it’s over. What I would say is that lots of people, if they look at the press, they might think the election is a foregone conclusion.
Actually, it’s a relatively small amount of voters across the country – about 130,000 people have been estimated – who can make the difference in this election.
Asked by presenter Nick Ferrari whether those voters could bring about a Tory victory, she said: “There’s quite a lot of seats that are very, very marginal, Nick. So, actually, just a handful of voters in those seats can change the outcome in those seats.”
Stephen Flynn also said voters in Scotland will need to choose whether they want members of parliament who will “go and sit quietly behind Keir Starmer and nod along”, or those who will stand up to him.
Speaking on BBC Breakfast, SNP’s Westminster leader said:
Do they want members of parliament who will sit opposite Keir Starmer, will stand up to him on the biggest issues, who will argue against austerity, argue for better relations with the European Union, argue for investment in our NHS, action on the cost-of-living crisis, for Scotland’s right to choose and recognition of the state of Palestine?
If they believe in that, then vote for the SNP, and that over the course of the next 48 hours I believe will come through to the general public and ensure that right across Scotland we can win the seats where it’s a very close battle between ourselves and the Labour Party.”
Meanwhile the SNP’s Westminster leader Stephen Flynn has just been on BBC Breakfast, where he said he was “massively concerned” voters across Scotland reporting they have not received their postal votes.
He told BBC Breakfast:
I’m massively concerned about that, like almost every candidate across Scotland that I believe to be the case. I’ve had numerous emails from people who have not received their postal ballot, that’s simply not good enough.
You know, we warned the Prime Minister of this when it became apparent that he was going to choose the election date because, of course, for a huge majority of the people of Scotland, it’s now the school holidays, people are away on holiday.
If their postal vote didn’t land in time, then they’re now disenfranchised from this election, they’re not able to vote for who they want to represent them at Westminster, whether that’s the SNP, or otherwise, that’s simply not good enough.
I see some individuals are blaming the Royal Mail but the reality is the system is not fit for purpose, and we need to see huge reform. We also need to see a big reflection on how we’ve managed to get into a situation where a prime minister can at his own whim declare an election, the Tories decided this was the way that they want the elections to operate in the UK.”
Postal affairs minister ‘urgently’ investigating ballot delays
The postal affairs minister is “urgently” investigating delays to postal ballots being delivered, Health Minister Maria Caulfield has said.
Postal affairs minister Kevin Hollinrake has criticised Royal Mail for failing to deliver votes in time for the General Election.
Caulfield told Sky News:
Kevin is taking this very seriously. He’s in direct contact with the Royal Mail.
It doesn’t seem to be an issue in my constituency, but I know a number of colleagues where people haven’t received their postal votes and are worried about that.
Kevin is investigating this urgently. I know there’s extra resources going into this to try and do a sweep of all the sorting offices and make sure they’re out there.
If people have only just received their postal vote, they can take it to their polling station on election day and it will still be counted.”
Jim Waterson
British female politicians have become the victims of fake pornography, with some of their faces used in nude images created using artificial intelligence.
Political candidates targeted on one prominent fake pornography website include: the Labour deputy leader, Angela Rayner; the education secretary, Gillian Keegan; the Commons leader, Penny Mordaunt; the former home secretary, Priti Patel; and the Labour backbencher Stella Creasy, according to Channel 4 News.
Many of the images have been online for several years and attracted hundreds of thousands of views.
While some are crude Photoshops featuring the politician’s head imposed on to another person’s naked body, other images appear to be more complicated deepfakes that have been created using AI technology. Some of the politicians targeted have now contacted police.
Dehenna Davison, a Conservative MP until the recent dissolution of parliament, is one of those featured on the site. She told Channel 4 News it was “really strange” that people would target women like her and she found it “quite violating”.
She said that unless governments around the world put in place a proper regulatory framework for AI, there would be “major problems”.
Creasy told the broadcaster that she felt “sick” to learn about the images and that “none of this is about sexual pleasure, it’s all about power and control”.
Thursday’s general election is an opportunity to “draw a permanent line” under the Scottish independence debate, a senior Scottish Conservative has said.
With his party’s election campaign entering its final days, party chairman Craig Hoy said voting for the Conservatives in “key seats” where the party is going toe-to-toe with the SNP could “finish off any hope the SNP have of seeking independence”.
He said this would enable the country to focus on “the things that really matter”, such as healthcare and roads.
This General Election in Scotland is a huge opportunity to beat the SNP, so that all of the focus can finally be on the things that really matter, such as faster GP appointments and fixing the roads.
If voters back the Scottish Conservatives in the key seats where we are going toe-to-toe with the nationalists, it could be the season finale of the SNP’s bid for independence.
We could finish off any hope the SNP have of seeking independence and draw a permanent line under the debate that has divided Scotland for more than a decade.
Here is a roundup of LibDem leader Ed Davey’s stunts throughout this campaign. But can he pull off the greatest stunt of them all (becoming the third biggest party in the Commons)?
Health leaders have warned that strikes “must not become the status quo” for the NHS as junior doctors in England return to work after a five-day walkout, PA reports.
It is expected that tens of thousands of appointments, procedures and operations were postponed as a result of the industrial action by members of the British Medical Association (BMA).
NHS leaders said that hospitals have been left to “pick up the pieces” as staff work to reschedule all of the appointments lost during strike days.
Officials are expected to confirm the number of appointments that were postponed on Friday – the day after voters take to the polls in the General Election.
Both the Conservatives and Labour have pledged to resume talks with the BMA’s Junior Doctors Committee if they are voted to power.
Health Secretary Victoria Atkins pledged to “get back into the negotiating room immediately after the election” while Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said that he will call the BMA on 5 July.
Health leaders have called for the long-running dispute to be brought to a close swiftly.
Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said the impact of the strike will be felt “for some time to come” adding:
We know that tens of thousands of operations and appointments are likely to have been cancelled.
Now health leaders and their teams will need to begin picking up the pieces by rescheduling all these so that patients can get the treatments they so desperately need.
It is important to remember that it is patients who are bearing the brunt of this ongoing dispute, patients who are often waiting in pain or discomfort for care.
While we recognise that junior doctors have genuine issues over pay, conditions and training, it is questionable that these strikes in the midst of a General Election campaign could have moved the dial. We are concerned that so many patients should have their care disrupted when no government was in a position to negotiate.
We hope that the next government can re-start negotiations and bring this dispute to an end so the NHS can focus on improving performance and cutting waiting lists rather than filling rota gaps and rescheduling appointments.”
Will Thatcher’s home town vote for first Labour MP?
Robyn Vinter
Projections show there is a real chance on Thursday of what would be the first ever Labour victory in Margaret Thatcher’s home town.
The true blue constituency has never voted Labour, not even during the New Labour landslide of 1997, when huge swathes of the country left the Tories behind.
Grantham continued to resist the pull, with the Conservative vote share only increasing every election. By 2019, Gareth Davies, the incumbent Tory MP, had a whopping 66% of the vote.
But such is the disastrous polling for Rishi Sunak’s party that on Friday morning, voters in the seat of Grantham and Bourne, renamed from Grantham and Stamford to take into account a boundary change, could be waking up to their first elected Labour MP. There was one period in 2007, when their MP Quentin Davies defected to Labour, but as soon as voters had the chance in 2010 Labour was relegated to third place with a solid Conservative win.
Though a boundary change is a factor in the town’s potential new switch of allegiance, projections from the consultancy Electoral Calculus using the old boundary show Labour would still steal the seat from the Tories. In other words, people in Grantham are likely to vote for change.
Large financial backers are returning to Labour
Rowena Mason
Labour HQ was shocked and delighted to discover the party had raised £4m during the first two weeks of the election campaign, while the beleaguered Tories managed just £290,000.
But according to a Labour donor who used to raise funds for the party, the adage “when power shifts, so too does the money” rings true.
Donations of more than £11,180 – a sum that recently increased from £7,500 – must be reported to and published by the Electoral Commission and the turnaround in Labour’s fortunes with large financial backers could not be more stark. Over the decade until Starmer became leader, Labour had lost more than 95% of its big private donors, according to party sources involved in raising cash.
Some business figures had lost interest when the party was no longer in power, others faded away during the Ed Miliband era, and then a real exodus occurred during the Jeremy Corbyn years.
The real blow came in 2019 when the longstanding Labour funder David Sainsbury, of the supermarket dynasty, gave £8m to Jo Swinson’s Liberal Democrats. “That was a low point,” recalls one person involved in raising cash for the party.
But in the last four years, not only have private donations come trickling back, but Starmer’s party has had an influx of “mega-donors” – people giving hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pounds each time.
The cash has been flowing so readily that private donations now outstrip funding from the trade unions:
The Guardian’s Whitehall editor, Rowena Mason, is on the campaign bus with Rishi Sunak today.
She writes:
Sunak had an early start this morning as he toured an Ocado warehouse at 5am – watching the robots pack bags and talking to workers about their 10 hour shifts in fridge-like temperatures.
The prime minister has appeared to be more chirpy and less tetchy this week, now the end of the campaign is in sight and the rows over D-Day and gambling have subsided a bit.
After boarding the bus, he stopped for a McDonalds wrap for breakfast and revealed that his regime of fasting all day on Monday has gone out the window during the campaign.
That avocado never stood a chance:
48 hours to go
It is 7am, and you know what that means: exactly 48 hours from now, polling stations will open across the UK.
With that in mind, the Guardian’s Rupert Neate has spoken to YouGov about how undecided voters could shape the results:
Pollsters from YouGov reckon about 12% of the electorate are still undecided. They tracked down 641 of them, and discovered that, while they are evenly spread across age groups, they are much more likely to be female (67%), to have voted leave in the EU referendum (43%, against 30% for remain), and to have voted Conservative at the last general election (43% compared to 15% who voted Labour).
When questioned (which can be hard as uncertain voters are less likely to respond to pollsters) some are more undecided than others. They found that 9% are likely to end up voting Conservative, 9% for Labour, 5% for the Lib Dems, 4% Green and 3% Reform. A quarter of the undecided voters are “unlikely to actually vote”.
“This leaves 45% of the overall sample of people who are ‘truly undecided’, having told us they are at least 6/10 likely to vote at the election, but even with one week to go won’t commit to a party,” says YouGov’s director of political research, Adam McDonnell. “This group accounts for 6% of the entire public.”
It’s a far larger group of people than at the 2019 election, and is unusually concentrated among one party. “For months and months we have noticed that people who voted Conservative in 2019 are more likely to be undecided,” says Surridge. “By this point in the campaign we would have expected the proportion of “don’t knows” to have come down below 10%.”
This morning’s front pages
It is almost 7am: let’s take a look at the day’s top stories.
The Guardian leads with an interview with shadow energy security secretary Ed Miliband, who promises that Labour will take the lead on global efforts to tackle the climate crisis:
The I Paper: Labour faces up to prospect of far-right neighbour in France with early talks
Metro: Naver mind the ballots
The Daily Telegraph: Royal Mail blamed for postal vote chaos
The Daily Mail: Britain’s forces not ready for ‘conflict of any scale’
The Times: Starmer: a big majority will be best for Britain
The Daily Express: Voting reform ‘risks losing hundreds of Tory MPs for a generation’
Scotland’s Daily Record: Sacre Bleu!
The Daily Mirror: Give our children hope
And the Liberal Democrats will call on voters to “end the sewage scandal” and vote for “historic change”.
Ahead of his visits to the South West of England, LibDem leader Ed Davey said: “In just 48 hours’ time, the British public can vote to end the sewage scandal and kick the Conservatives out of power,” PA reports.
“Filthy sewage dumping has caused untold damage to our precious environment and left people feeling unable to swim in their local rivers and beaches because they’re worried about getting sick.”
