General election live: Starmer dismisses Tory false claims about his work ethic as ‘desperate’ and ‘bordering on hysterical’ | General election 2024
Starmer dismisses Tory false claims about his work ethic as ‘increasingly desperate stuff’ and ‘bordering on hysterical’
Q: Are you worried about people not getting postal ballots?
Starmer says he is worried about these reports. He says everything should be done to make sure people get their ballot papers.
Q: What do you make of Tories claims that you won’t work in the evenings? (See 9.29am.)
Starmer says this is “increasingly desperate stuff”.
He says he can hardly believe that, 48 hours before an election, the Tories have not got anything to say.
He says he has been saying that the Tories have nothing positive to say. And now the Tories are proving that. They are in a “negative, desperate loop”. It is a sign of “increasing desperation, bordering on hysterical now”.
UPDATE: Sunak said:
This is just increasingly desperate stuff.
I actually can hardly believe that, 48 hours before the election, the Conservative party has got nothing positive to say as they go into this.
I’ve been arguing throughout this campaign, you’ll have heard me many times saying they haven’t changed, they’re just the same, nothing’s going to change, and they’re proving it. They are not saying look, if you vote Tory and vote Conservative on Thursday, these things will happen. They’re just in this negative, desperate loop.
And it is really desperate. My family is really important to me, as they will be to every single person watching this.
And I just think it’s increasing desperation, bordering on hysterical now.
Key events
Q: Would you clamp down on British companies faciliting trade with Russia?
This was prompted by a story by Ed Conway, Sky’s economics editor.
NEW
How British companies are helping Russia to export its gas, earning Vladimir Putin billions of euros for his war effort in the process.
An investigation into the awkward energy story Europe is reluctant to confront https://t.co/TXZpdrQ707— Ed Conway (@EdConwaySky) July 2, 2024
Starmer said the government should have clear rules in place for trade. But he then launched into a general point about energy, claiming Labour’s plan to set up the Great British Energy firm would lead to lower energy bills.
Starmer dismisses Tory false claims about his work ethic as ‘increasingly desperate stuff’ and ‘bordering on hysterical’
Q: Are you worried about people not getting postal ballots?
Starmer says he is worried about these reports. He says everything should be done to make sure people get their ballot papers.
Q: What do you make of Tories claims that you won’t work in the evenings? (See 9.29am.)
Starmer says this is “increasingly desperate stuff”.
He says he can hardly believe that, 48 hours before an election, the Tories have not got anything to say.
He says he has been saying that the Tories have nothing positive to say. And now the Tories are proving that. They are in a “negative, desperate loop”. It is a sign of “increasing desperation, bordering on hysterical now”.
UPDATE: Sunak said:
This is just increasingly desperate stuff.
I actually can hardly believe that, 48 hours before the election, the Conservative party has got nothing positive to say as they go into this.
I’ve been arguing throughout this campaign, you’ll have heard me many times saying they haven’t changed, they’re just the same, nothing’s going to change, and they’re proving it. They are not saying look, if you vote Tory and vote Conservative on Thursday, these things will happen. They’re just in this negative, desperate loop.
And it is really desperate. My family is really important to me, as they will be to every single person watching this.
And I just think it’s increasing desperation, bordering on hysterical now.
Starmer is now taking media questions.
Q: [From Jess Parker from the BBC] What will be the first thing you do if you become PM on Friday?
Starmer says the first thing he will do is change the mindset of politics. He wants to “return politics to service”. It should always be “country first, party second”, he says.
Keir Starmer is speaking in Nottinghamshire now. He is also delivering the same stump speech from yesterday, saying he wants to deliver “a summer of change”.
But change will only happen if people vote for it, he says. He says Labour will keep campaigning until 10pm on Thursday.
Back at the Q&A a woman tells Rishi Sunak says he had to wait three years for an autism diagnosis for her son. She says they had to get a private diagnosis, costing £2,000. What will the government do to improve this situation?
Sunak says there is a challenge here. He says the government is going to make it easier for people to get treatement from the NHS provided by a private healthcare provider.
(He is talking generally. He does not say that this is something available to people needing an autism diagnosis for a child.)
Sunak also says the government is giving new powers to pharmacies.
(Pharmacists don’t deal with autism.)
And Sunak’s final point is about the waiting lists that built up during Covid.
(He ignored the question, which was about autism provision entirely, and instead just defaulted to his stock ‘what to say about the NHS’ answer.)
Reform UK candidate says she is backing Tories because of Farage’s failure to tackle racism in party
A Reform UK candidate has defected to the Conservative, hitting out at the “racist, misogynistic and bigoted” views of some of her former colleagues, PA Media reports.
Georgie David said in a statement issued by the Tories that, even though she did not think the Reform UK leadership (ie, Nigel Farage and Richard Tice) were racist, they had failed to tackle the problem in the party. He said:
I am hereby announcing my decision to leave the Reform Party and stand down as their candidate for West Ham and Beckton, with immediate effect.
I am in no doubt that the party and its senior leadership are not racist.
However, as the vast majority of candidates are indeed racist, misogynistic, and bigoted, I do not wish to be directly associated with people who hold such views that are so vastly opposing to my own and what I stand for.
I also have been significantly frustrated and dismayed by the failure of the Reform party’s leadership to tackle this issue in any meaningful way, and their attempts to instead try to brush it under the carpet or cry foul play.
As such, I have now suspended my campaign with Reform, and I an endorsing the Conservative party – I would encourage all of my fellow patriots to do the same.
Asked what he would do to improve growth, Sunak says he will cut tax. But Labour will introduced 70 new French-style employment laws, he claims. He says this will lead to more strikes.
Sunak is now taking questions. The first is about how he will restore integrity.
Sunak says he stands up for what he believes in. And he says that he set out his priorities, allowing people to judge whether he was achieving what he wanted to. He claims this is unusual for a politician.
Rishi Sunak is currently giving a stump speech in Oxfordshire. It is broadly the same as the one he was giving yesterday, where he starts by saying he understands why people are frustrated with the government, argues that it would be wrong to give Labour a “blank cheque” and says that, if the Tories win, he will continue to cut taxes.
Although he is emphasising what he describes as the dangers of “a Labour supermajority”, interestingly he is not using the line about not “surrendering” to Labour that he used repeatedly in last week’s TV debate.
Guide to how constituency boundaries have changed, with notional results for 2019 for new constituencies
There has been a major boundary review since 2019 and on Thursday most people will be voting in a constituency that has either changed its boundaries, or that has been replaced with a new seat, with quite different boundaries and a new name. We have got a guide to the new constituencies (below) and, using your postcode, you can check how the boundary changes affect you.
On election night it is important to know, not just how many seats parties are winning, but how the share of the vote has changed since 2019. Given that most boundaries have changed, comparisons with the results from 2019 would be misleading. But the academics Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher have produced notional results for 2019 based on the new boundaries (what the share of the vote would have been for each party, in each constituency, if the 2024 boundaries had been in place then). It is impossible to know for sure, because general election results are only counted on a constituency-wide basis. But, using ward-by-ward data from local election results, Rallings and Thrasher have been able to produce a reliable guide. The Guardian and other news organisations will be using these figures on election night as the benchmark to assess how the performance of parties has changed since 2019, and these figures are included in our interactive graphic too.
Streeting says ‘lies and hypocrisy’ from Tories ‘overwhelming’ after party spreads false claims about Starmer’s work ethic
As parties get increasingly desperate and fearful of losing in election campaigns, they often ramp up the negative campaigning, and there has been a very good example of that from the Conservative party over the last 24 hours.
Yesterday Keir Starmer gave an interview to Chris Evans on Virgin Radio in which he said, if he becomes PM, he will try to carry on with the habit he has had for some years of making sure that he does not work on Friday nights so he can spend time with his wife and children. It was an unexceptional thing to say, and Virgin Radio did not even highlight it in their press release.
But yesterday afternoon some news websites started running headlines saying that Starmer had said that he would not work beyond 6pm. And the Conservatives picked this up as an attack line, despite knowing it was not what Starmer had said at all. This is from the Conservative party’s official X account.
Keir Starmer has said he’d clock off work at 6pm if he became Prime Minister.
You deserve better than a part-time Prime Minister.
The only way to prevent this is to vote Conservative on Thursday. pic.twitter.com/yF0ZBAttRh
— Conservatives (@Conservatives) July 1, 2024
Keir Starmer has said he’d clock off work at 6pm if he became Prime Minister.
You deserve better than a part-time Prime Minister.
The only way to prevent this is to vote Conservative on Thursday.
This is from Grant Shapps, the defence secretary.
Virtually every military intervention we’ve carried out has happened at night, partly to keep our servicemen & women safe.
The British people will wonder who would be standing in for Starmer between 6pm & 9am – Angela Rayner, David Lammy, Ed Miliband?
Defending Britain’s…
— Rt Hon Grant Shapps (@grantshapps) July 1, 2024
Virtually every military intervention we’ve carried out has happened at night, partly to keep our servicemen & women safe.
The British people will wonder who would be standing in for Starmer between 6pm & 9am – Angela Rayner, David Lammy, Ed Miliband?
Defending Britain’s security isn’t a daylight hours only job.
This morning Maria Caulfield, the health minister, was still trying to run the same attack line – although on Sky News the presenter, Matt Barbet, told her bluntly she what she was saying was untrue.
Conservative Health Minister Maria Caulfield pushes the outright lie that Keir Starmer has “said he is going to be doing a four day week”.
After being corrected, Caulfield immediately doubles down with another false claim that Starmer has committed to working a “flexible” week. pic.twitter.com/c2psE3Lrhf
— Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) July 2, 2024
This has been one of the biggest lies of the campaign – although arguably so transparently absurd as to be relatively harmless. In an LBC interview earlier in the campaign Rishi Sunak himself praised Starmer for having a good work/life balance, and not neglecting the need to spend time with his family.
This morning Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, was doing a media round for Labour, and he said the “lies and hypocrisy” coming from the Tories were now overwhelming. He told Sky News.
What we’ve seen this morning is just the latest, desperate attack from the Conservative party – the party that brought you the biggest lockdown party in Downing Street now talking about [Keir Starmer’s] work ethic.
The stench of their lies and hypocrisy is even more overwhelming than the vomit they left for Downing Street cleaners to clean up.
And, like the Downing Street cleaners, if we’re given the chance on Thursday, Labour will clean up the Tories’ mess too.
And, as far as I’m concerned, this is just the latest example of why this circus needs to be brought to an end and why people like Maria Caulfield, out this morning debasing herself on national television, should also be removed at the general election.
Sunak is doing the interview from a supermarket. Thompson asks him if he knows the prices of a loaf of bread. Sunak says at Morrisons a tiger bloomer loaf is £1.35.
Thompson asks if he knows how much it has gone up in price over the last five years.
Sunak says he does not have that figure to hand. Thompson tells him it is 28%.
And that’s the end of the interview.
(It was not a phone-in, as I said earlier. Sorry; I was misinformed.)
