Election

Read the latest General Election news, views and analysis.

Tuesday

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Revealed: Tory member behind anti-Reform attack ad firm

Are the Tories feeling the heat from Reform? Apparently so, if online adverts are anything to go by, with London-based Facebook users complaining of an increase in online adverts targeting Nigel Farage’s party. The latest example involves an advert which tells social media users ‘Vote Reform, Get Labour’ — a phrase trotted out regularly by numerous Tory politicians. Facebook rules say that when an advert is about ‘social issues, elections or politics’, those paying for the adverts ‘are required to disclose who paid for the ad’. In this case, the advertiser has been listed as ‘3rd Party Ltd’. On 3rd Party Ltd’s website, the organisation says it is registered with

Ross Clark Ross Clark

What’s the real reason Jim Ratcliffe is backing Starmer?

On the face of it, there could hardly be a better example of a turkey voting for Christmas than the news that Jim Ratcliffe has come out and backed the Labour party. Yes, a Brexiteer who owns one of Britain’s six oil refineries really is throwing his weight behind Keir Starmer, a man who wanted to frustrate Brexit through a second referendum and whose party is committed to speeding up net zero by refusing to issue new licenses for oil and gas extraction in the North Sea and by decarbonising all power by 2030. Clearly, Ratcliffe is not stupid, so is he suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, or is there some

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Trussonomics is featuring heavily in the election

Is Trussonomics making a comeback? That’s the suggestion today, as Jeremy Hunt was recorded on the campaign trail telling students that Liz Truss’s goals for the economy were a ‘good thing to aim for’. As Chancellor, he said, he was ‘trying to basically achieve some of the same things’ as Truss, but ‘more gradually’ compared to the former prime minister’s timeline. Is this a gotcha moment? Labour think so, insisting that Hunt’s comments show an ongoing ‘addiction to dangerous Trussonomics’. It’s a stretch, not least because Hunt is credited with undoing almost every part of Truss’s so-called mini-Budget, when he replaced Kwasi Kwarteng as Chancellor just weeks into her premiership. Hunt is

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour have treated Rosie Duffield terribly

Should a candidate feel forced to pull out of public hustings events because of concerns about their safety? No, of course not, though that’s exactly what our current political culture has caused Rosie Duffield to do. One of her own Labour party colleagues, Lord Cashman, had the whip suspended after he suggested she was ‘frit or lazy’ for doing this. He has since apologised, but this is just the latest in a whole series of incidents where Duffield has been attacked by her own side side. Duffield spoke to Andrew Neil on Times Radio today. She spoke about an ongoing failure from her own party leadership to, until relatively recently,

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Farage threatens vetting company with legal action

Uh oh. After multiple reports of controversial candidates, Reform UK boss Nigel Farage has announced that he is threatening a vetting firm with legal action. The party leader has accused the company, Vetting.com, of ‘stitching up’ Reform UK. Golly… In April, the Farage-founded party signed a £144,000 contract with Vetting.com on the agreement the firm would flag up unsuitable parliamentary candidates with extreme views. The vetting company is owned by Sphinx Technology Ltd – which is in turn co-owned by Colin Bloom, an ex-Tory adviser who worked under Boris Johnson and who was made a CBE by the former Conservative party leader last year. Reform was assured at the time

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Starmer flounders on phone-in over private schools and Corbyn

With only 16 days to go until the election – and today being the last day you can register to vote – election campaigning is heating up and political plans are coming under ever more scrutiny. This morning Sir Keir Starmer appeared on LBC to take questions from the public on Labour’s 2024 manifesto pledges – but it wasn’t all plain sailing. On Labour’s plans to add VAT onto private school fees, Michelle, a headteacher of a specialist school, phoned in to ask about her pupils, all of whom have diagnosed special educational needs. She told Sir Keir: 30 per cent don’t have an educational healthcare plan to exempt them

Euan McColm

How the Scottish Tories can survive

‘The thing is,’ says one Conservative member of the Scottish parliament, ‘that we wanted rid of him – just not like this.’ Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross’s decision to stand in next month’s General Election infuriated colleagues. His response to that backlash – to resign his position – has driven some of them positively apoplectic with rage. If Douglas Ross’s successor wishes to see a revival in the political centre-right in Scotland, their first decision should be to abolish the party they lead The Scottish Conservatives, revived from near death by former leader Ruth Davidson, are now heading towards polling day under the stewardship of a man who’s made it

Iain Macwhirter

In praise of Nigel Farage’s war on banks

Why did it take Nigel Farage to suggest clawing back some of the super profits pocketed recently by British banks? Why hasn’t Labour thought of stopping the Bank of England paying interest on the deposits of commercial banks? There is, after all, plenty of money for the taking. In 2023, HSBC reported a record net profit of over $30 billion (£24 billion). Lloyds made around £5.5 billion and Barclays trousered £6 billion. The UK banks have never had it so good. They have been coining it because of high interest rates which acts like a reverse ATM machine. The Reform election manifesto, sorry ‘contract’, proposes accessing some of this by getting

John Oxley

Labour shouldn’t squander the chance to fix council tax

In the final election push, the Tories are trying to drag the Labour party into a game of taxation whack-a-mole. The Conservatives seem to think that the threat of tax rises is the one lifeline they have. After bungling their £2,000 per-family line with a row about where the numbers come from, they are now teasing out denials about specific raises from the left. First, it was over Capital Gains Tax, and then council tax, forcing Labour to deny they would re-band, as Welsh Labour have done. A tax levied according to what your property was worth (or, indeed, hypothetically worth) in 1991 feels a bit baffling Starmer and his

Zewditu Gebreyohanes

In defence of hereditary peers

‘Hereditary peers remain indefensible,’ says Labour’s manifesto. The party plans to rectify this issue by ‘introducing legislation to remove the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords’. If it follows through on its promise, Keir Starmer’s party will be making a big mistake. Labour suggests that its reform will make the Lords a fairer and more ‘modern’ place. But what Starmer is essentially advocating is a chamber that is Prime Minister-appointed (save for the Bishops who it seems would, at least for now, remain). The hereditary peers provide a necessary counterbalance to a patronage-based system; their existence is one of the checks and balances

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

We’ll never find the heir to Blair

The ghost of 1997 haunts the 2024 election. The defining image of this year’s contest, barring any major upsets over the next fortnight, is already clear: Rishi Sunak drenched like a drowned chipmunk outside 10 Downing Street as he called the snap election. ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, Labour’s ’97 campaign anthem, was blasted out in the background. It was a pitiable sight: Sunak looked hapless, luckless and friendless. A John Major for the 21st century. The first term of Blair – pre-9/11, pre-Iraq, the time of Gordon Brown being prudent and restrained (or so we thought) – exists as a nostalgic golden age Like many people of a conservative

Monday

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Humza Yousaf attacks Farage and Braverman

Humza Yousaf is back with a bang. Now the embattled politician has taken to the Grauniad’s opinion pages to write a fiery piece on ‘anti-Muslim hatred’. In an explosive entry, the ex-SNP leader claims that Muslims across the continent are ‘fearful’ due to ‘growing popularity and mainstreaming of the far right’. ‘It is increasingly difficult to persuade fellow Muslims that Europe does not have a problem with our very existence,’ he notes. In 2024, almost half the world’s population will take part in elections. Many countries have already gone to the polls, and in a number of countries, particularly across Europe, the biggest gains have been made by those who

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Reform candidate defends Hitler remarks

Since the return of Nigel Farage, Reform UK has been going from strength to strength. Last week a YouGov survey for the Times saw the Farage-founded group overtake the Tories in the polls for the first time. Today JL Partners’s research has found that since the arch-Brexiteer’s comeback, Rishi Sunak’s popularity has dropped to pre-election lows. But it’s not all been plain sailing for Reform UK. Now the party’s Welwyn Hatfield candidate has come under fire for comments he made in relation to a pseudoscientific theory about multiple personality types – in which he described Adolf Hitler as ‘brilliant’ and ‘able to inspire people to action’. Oh dear… And there’s

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Are the Tories about to fall into Farage’s trap – again?

Nigel Farage’s tail is up. The Reform party election campaign has gone better than he dared hope and its poll rating is up by several percentage points since he re-entered the fray. Today he went to South Wales to launch what he insisted was not a manifesto, but a ‘contract’ with the electorate over its campaigning priorities for the next five years. He also tacitly acknowledged that its contents were not quite as honed as he might have wanted, owing to the election happening in early July rather than the autumn. Farage has admitted that Reform can’t win this election, but is mainly expecting to secure a Commons bridgehead to

James Heale James Heale

Farage’s ‘contract’ is all about hurting the Tories

Nigel Farage has launched his party’s manifesto, which he’s termed ‘Our contract with you’. The Reform leader dropped the word ‘manifesto’, claiming the word is synonymous in voters’ minds with ‘lies’. Farage told attendees he’d chosen Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales for today’s launch to highlight Labour’s record there, yet the document’s contents indicate that it’s the Tories he’s really targeting. The 24-page contract promises to freeze non-essential immigration, introduce a new tax on employers who hire foreign workers, cut taxes by £88 billion and leave the European Court on Human Rights. It promises a ‘patriotic curriculum’ and 30,000 more full-time members of the Armed Forces. All job seekers would

Andrew Tettenborn

Reform’s radical manifesto would do wonders for democracy

In this election, neither Labour nor the Tories are particularly interested in serious constitutional reform. By contrast, there’s one smaller opposition party that makes it quite clear in its manifesto that it does believe in serious democratic change to make government radically responsive to what voters want. That party is Reform. True, there’s a lot in its manifesto, launched today, to make you cautious: its elements of rehashed free-market Thatcherism, for instance, not to mention its fairly sketchy funding projections. But a number of its constitutional proposals make for interesting reading. Some ideas are predictable, such as replacing the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights) with a British Bill of Rights,

Alexander Horne

Remainers are going to be disappointed in Labour

Labour’s election manifesto has been criticised by many commentators for being too vague; like a ‘choose your own adventure’ book which would allow the party to do almost whatever it likes in government. This was highlighted today by Rachel Reeve’s remarks on Brexit. In an interview with the Financial Times, the shadow chancellor pointed out the need to improve elements of the UK’s trade deal with the EU and ‘reset’ Britain’s global image. This is said to mark a shift in tone (if not substance) from a party which previously did not want to focus on these issues.  On Brexit, the manifesto is plain that there will be ‘no return to the single market, the customs union, or freedom

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Labour peer suspended over Duffield tweets

Another day, another drama. This time it involves a run-in between Labour peer Lord Cashman and the party’s candidate for Canterbury, Rosie Duffield – which has resulted in the Labour peer losing the whip over some rather controversial comments… Duffield, a vocal women’s rights campaigner who has received death threats over her stance on gender issues, announced on Friday that she will withdraw from election hustings events due to safety concerns. Blasting ‘constant trolling, spite and misrepresentation’, she revealed she was ‘being pursued with a new vigour during this election’, before concluding that ‘sadly the actions of a few fixated people has made my attendance impossible’. Instead the Canterbury candidate

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Can Rishi Sunak reduce the Tories’ losses?

Every morning in Conservative Campaign Headquarters, Tory aides kickstart the day by blasting out Elvis Presley’s ‘a little less conversation’ on the speakers. The song – which includes the lyrics ‘A little more bite and a little less bark / A little less fight and a little more spark’ – has quickly become the anthem of the Tory campaign. ‘I know the lyrics off by heart,’ says one sleep deprived staffer. Yet more than halfway into the election, there is little sign that the campaign is cutting through in the way strategists had hoped. The most optimistic one aide working on the campaign can be is ‘it has to get

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why the Tories’ tax black hole attack on Labour will backfire

The Conservatives love trying to reduce their estimates for the cost of a Labour government down to a neat per-household figure, which makes it easy for voters to appreciate but comes with the danger that the figure will fall apart on closer examination. That is what happened with Rishi’s Sunak’s claim, made in his ITV two-way debate with Keir Starmer, that Labour is planning tax rises of £2,000 per household. That turned out to be over four years rather than one, as many people might have assumed, and turned out to rely on all kind of assumptions which were made by Conservative party researchers rather than the Treasury officials to