Gove claims still time for Tories to defy polls in general election – live | General election 2024

The British public values the UK’s universities more highly than the legal system or the BBC, according to a survey of attitudes towards higher education by King’s College London.

Prof Bobby Duffy, the director of King’s College London’s policy institute, said universities came behind only the NHS, the armed forces and the royal family in a league table of UK institutions considered to be among the best in the world by the public.

The representative survey of 2,600 people, conducted in May, found nearly a third put universities ahead of the civil service, newspapers or parliament among key institutions, with similar backing from Labour and Conservative supporters.

Using a relatable football analogy, Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Michael Gove has insisted there is still time for the Conservatives to defy the polls, saying: “We’re not in ‘Fergie time’ yet.”

The Cabinet minister told Sky News:

There are opinion polls, as I’ve acknowledged and as we both know, that are not great, but it’s not the 90th minute, we’re not in ‘Fergie time’ yet.

There is still an opportunity for us to make these arguments and as we make these arguments my experience – and I know it’s just me and a range of seats, not every seat in the country – my experience is that when you do talk to voters, outline some of the tax dangers, outline some of Labour’s plans for the future, then people do think twice and people do recognise that by voting Conservatives you are both ensuring that there is a strong Conservative voice in Parliament, but also you are doing everything you can to prevent a series of tax increases that won’t just hit pensioners and first-time buyers, but also will hit the economy in the guts.”

…

I’m a Scotland fan, so you wait until the final whistle.

Sometimes it looks as though the odds are against you, but you keep on fighting.”

Well, he is certainly right about the odds. For those not familiar with the expression ‘Fergie time’, here is an explanation from Football Fancast:

Manchester United are synonymous with late goals. Their long-enduring reign of terror, when a double-digit clock ticks over 90, changed what added time was known as during the Sir Alex Ferguson era. Instead of ‘stoppage time’, it was christened ‘Fergie Time’ – a lingering aphorism that added time is awarded to allow a last-minute winner or equaliser.”

With that, this is me, Helen Sullivan, signing off without a football analogy.

Labour under pressure to be more radical about reforming private renting

Robert Booth

Back to housing: Labour is facing pressure to deliver more radical reforms of private renting amid fears landlords will find new ways to evict tenants despite the party confirming it would end no-fault evictions, ban bidding wars and introduce time limits to fix potentially lethal mould.

In a campaign push aimed at the “rip-off private rented sector”, Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, and the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, claimed private renters would be £250-a-year better off under a Labour government after it forces landlords to improve the energy efficiency of leaky rental homes.

Private landlords would no longer be able to auction rented homes to the highest bidder and requests for upfront rent will be capped, although it is not clear at what level. Labour has reiterated its pledge to “immediately ban no-fault evictions” and said it will “crack down on unscrupulous landlords ripping off tenants with extortionate rents and lurid living conditions”.

Zoe Williams

It was four weeks before election day when I spoke to one member of the constituency Labour party in Holborn and St Pancras, in central London, as he was on his way out of the door to go canvassing in Barnet, several miles away in north London. This is not at all unusual: victory is assured in Keir Starmer’s constituency, which has been continuously red since its creation in 1983. Next door, in Islington North, it was once a similar story. It has been Labour since 1937, with a couple of turbulent SDP years in the 80s; their canvassers have in the past been twinned with Stevenage, considered more useful there than in their own backyards.

Bookies are giving odds on Starmer’s win in his constituency of 1/250 and 1/500, making him one of the safest bets in the general election. The result in Islington is less predictable, since Jeremy Corbyn is standing as an independent. His popularity as a local MP is well known. But, as Corbyn’s communications guy, Oly Durose, tells me, there are the people on the doorstep who say: “I’ll vote Jeremy, of course. I’ll vote Labour.” Hard to say from this distance which of those loyalties will win out – the party or the man – once everyone is clear that they are at odds.

Almost every member of the constituency Labour party who spoke to me did so on condition of anonymity. Sometimes that was because what they’re engaged in would see them expelled from the party (canvassing for Corbyn, for instance, when Labour’s candidate is Praful Nargund); other times because they’re embroiled in local rivalries and enmities of such epic history, spanning decades, that to break cover in the press would be an inelegant escalation.

In neither constituency is any party but Labour in serious contention, but in each there is an independent challenger from the left. That reflects the wider picture: this election has 459 independent candidates standing, about 10% of the overall number, and more than twice as many as in 2015. But the red-on-red battle varies from place to place, in its subjects and its symmetry.

NHS will need extra £38bn a year by 2030, thinktank warns

Denis Campbell

More now on that report into the NHS. The NHS will need £38bn more a year than planned by the end of the next parliament in order to cut the care backlog and end long treatment delays, political parties have been warned.

Labour and Conservative promises on NHS funding “fall well short” of what the beleaguered health service needs to recover from years of underinvestment, according to the Health Foundation.

Politicians are not being honest with the public about the money needed to revive an NHS that is grappling with record numbers awaiting care, inadequate access to GPs and a collapse in public satisfaction, it added.

The analysis said: “Addressing the funding required to improve the NHS would mean facing up to difficult trade-offs with the funding needed by other public services and levels of taxation.

“Honesty about these trade-offs has so far been conspicuous by its absence from a general election debate that has been characterised by ‘a conspiracy of silence’ about the choices on public spending and taxation that will confront the next government.”

Whoever is prime minister on 5 July should “level with the public” about the true level of funding the NHS will need to once again deliver key waiting time targets, such as the 18-week wait for hospital care, as well as paying staff more and increasing capital investment.

NHS bosses endorsed the Health Foundation’s analysis. “Put simply, if a new government is going to fulfil campaign promises to tackle NHS backlogs and improve performance, then it will have to invest further,” said Dr Layla McCay, the NHS Confederation’s director of policy. The NHS will need “billions of extra funding”, she added.

Julian Hartley, the chief executive of hospitals group NHS Providers, said health trusts desperately need more capital funding to tackle the effects of “chronic underinvestment in buildings and facilities”, which has left some hospitals so decrepit that they “threaten patient and staff safety”.

It is 7am in the UK. Let’s take a look at today’s lead stories.

The Guardian has an interview with shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, who has promised to close the gender pay gap, which now stands at 14.3%. She promises to make companies of more than 250 employees report on and come up with plans to fix pay disparities.

And then there are the Tories, who dominate the rest of the headlines thanks to some terrible polls, along with words like “bloodbath”, “despair” and “worst defeat for 100 years” – or wait, make that “for 200 years”.

The Financial Times is a little more restrained, with Sunak “taking credit for” inflation falling to the BoE target. Sunak, the FT writes, “argued that the Tories, who trail the opposition Labour party in the polls by about 20 points, had restored economic stability and could cut taxes as a result.”

“However”, the article continues, “services and core inflation remain higher than in the Eurozone and the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee is widely expected this Thursday to keep rates on hold at their 16-year high of 5.25%”

It quotes an economist as saying an August rates cut is a “long shot”.

The Times

The i: Tories despair as poll signals worst defeat in 200 years.

The Independent: Major poll shock: Sunak to lose seat in Tory bloodbath

The Express and Daily Mail are leading on Just Stop Oil activists spraying orange powder paint over Stonehenge.