Tory government ‘worst in postwar era’, claims expert study – live | General election 2024

Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have both condemned the Just Stop Oil after activists who targeted Stonehenge with orange powder paint.

Sunak said:

This is a disgraceful act of vandalism to one of the UK’s and the world’s oldest and most important monuments.

Just Stop Oil should be ashamed of their activists, and they and anyone associated with them, including a certain Labour party donor, should issue a condemnation of this shameful act immediately.

Sunak was referring to Dale Vince, who contributed to Just Stop Oil in the past but gave up doing so last year.

And Starmer said:

The damage done to Stonehenge is outrageous. Just Stop Oil are pathetic.

Those responsible must face the full force of the law.

Two people have been arrested in connection with the incident.

Rishi Sunak was in Suffolk this morning, where he visited the Sizewell B nuclear power station. Here are some of the points he made when he spoke to reporters.

This election is about the future, I want to build on this economic foundation that we now have and I want to keep cutting people’s taxes at every stage in their lives.

In contrast, Labour would reverse the progress that we’ve made and just whack taxes up for everyone, and I don’t want to see that happen.

• He claimed today’s meeting between Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un highlighted why Labour was a threat to national security. He said, while the Tories were committed to raising defence spending to 2.5% of GDP, Labour has not matched that promise. He went on:

I made the decisions to increase investment in defence spending to 2.5% of GDP, because we’re living in the most dangerous and uncertain time that our country has known since the end of the cold war.

Just from the conversations I’ve been having at the G7, and the Ukraine peace summit, that is a view that is shared widely across the world, that’s why it’s the right thing to do to invest more in our defence, to keep everybody safe.

Keir Starmer has not matched that pledge and that deeply concerns me ’cause the first duty of government is to protect the country.

If Keir Starmer is elected, one of the first things he will do is head off to a Nato summit having cut British defence spending from the planned increases that I’ve announced, and I think that sends exactly the wrong message, both to our allies, where we want to lead so that they invest more in their defence as well, but also to our adversaries, like Putin, and like the North Koreans, and actually we need to deter them with strength.

The Nato summit starts in Washington on Tuesday July, in the week after the general election on Thursday 4 July.

• Sunak said he was “pretty confident” that the decision by former Tory donor John Caudwell to start backing Labour was not something that voters would raise with him. “I’m pretty confident not a single person is going to talk to me about that,” he said.

Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak should not have their convictions removed for breaking Covid rules, Keir Starmer has said, amid calls from Conservative former cabinet ministers to nullify criminal convictions for Covid rule-breakers. Jessica Elgot has the story.

As John Stevens reports in a story for the Daily Mirror today, Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was complaining at a private Tory dinner earlier this year about the electorate’s “total failure to appreciate our superb record since 2010”.

But just how good is the Conservative party’s record in government over the past 14 years? Thankfully, we now have what is as close as we’re going to get to the authoritative, official verdict. Sir Anthony Seldon, arguably Britain’s leading contemporary political historian, is publishing a collection of essays written by prominent academics and other experts and they have analysed the record of the Conservative government from 2010 to 2024, looking at what it has achieved in every area of policy.

It is called The Conservative Effect 2010-2014: 14 Wasted Years? and it is published by Cambridge University Press.

And its conclusion is damning. It describes this as the worst government in postwar history.

Here is the conclusion of the final chapter, written by Seldon and his co-editor Tom Egerton, which sums up the overall verdict.

In comparison to the earlier four periods of one-party dominance post-1945, it is hard to see the years since 2010 as anything but disappointing. By 2024, Britain’s standing in the world was lower, the union was less strong, the country less equal, the population less well protected, growth more sluggish with the outlook poor, public services underperforming and largely unreformed, while respect for the institutions of the British state, including the civil service, judiciary and the police, was lower, as it was for external bodies, including the universities and the BBC, repeatedly attacked not least by government, ministers and right-wing commentators.

Do the unusually high number of external shocks to some extent let the governments off the hook? One above all – Brexit – was entirely of its own making and will be seen in history as the defining decision of these years. In 2024, the verdict on Brexit is almost entirely negative, with those who are suffering the most from it, as sceptics at the time predicted, the most vulnerable. The nation was certainly difficult to rule in these fourteen years, the Conservative party still more so. Longstanding problems certainly contributed to the difficulties the prime minister faced in providing clear strategic policy, including the 24-hour news cycle, the rise of social media and AI, and the frequency of scandals and crises. But it was the decision of the prime minister to choose to be distracted by the short term, rather than focusing on the strategic and the long term. The prime minister has agency: the incumbents often overlooked it.

Overall, it is hard to find a comparable period in history of the Conservatives which achieved so little, or which left the country at its conclusion in a more troubling state.

In their concluding essay, Seldon and Egerton argue that poor leadership was one of the main problems with the 14-year administration. They say that Boris Johnson and Liz Truss were “not up to the job” of being prime minister, and they have a low opinion of most of the other leading figures who have been in government. They say:

Very few cabinet ministers from 2010 to 2024 could hold a candle to the team who served under Clement Attlee – which included Ernest Bevin, Nye Bevan, Stafford Cripps, Hugh Gaitskell and Herbert Morrison. Or the teams who served under Wilson, Thatcher or Blair. Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt and Philip Hammond were rare examples of ministers of quality after 2010 …

A strong and capable prime minister is essential to governmental success in the British system. The earlier four periods saw two historic and landmark prime ministers, ie Churchill and Thatcher, with a succession of others who were capable if not agenda-changing PMs, including Macmillan, Wilson, Major and Blair. Since 2010, only Cameron came close to that level, with Sunak the best of the rest. Policy virtually stopped under May as Brexit consumed almost all the machine’s time, while serious policymaking ground to a halt under Johnson’s inept leadership, the worst in modern premiership, and the hapless Truss. Continuity of policy was not helped by each incoming prime minister despising their predecessor, with Truss’s admiration for Johnson the only exception. Thus they took next no time to understand what it was their predecessors were trying to do, and how to build on it rather than destroy it.

Seldon’s first book, published 40 years ago, was about Churchill’s postwar administration, and he has been editing similar collections of essays studying the record of administrations since Margaret Thatcher’s. He is a fair judge, and not given to making criticisms like this lightly.

The book is officially being published next week, and I’m quoting from a proof copy. In this version, the subtitle still has a question mark after 14 Wasted Years? Judging by the conclusion, that does not seem necessary.

Keir Starmer has claimed that the Tory claim he would penalise people with savings (see 9.39am) as evidence they are out of touch with the experience of real people.

This morning the Times and the Daily Express both splashed on Conservatives claims that what Starmer said about how he defined “working people” in his LBC phone-in yesterday showed Labour would tax savings. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, said anyone who did not meet Labour’s “narrow and misguided” definition of working would pay more.

In response, Starmer said today:

Of course, our definition covers people who’ve got savings, but it covers people who can’t just afford on top of that, to pay for other things. And nobody wants to use their savings to pay the bills of the day because the government’s lost control of the economy.

So, I’m afraid that’s an attack, which has backfired spectacularly, in terms of showing just how out of touch they are.

Asked if he would consider himself a “working man”, Starmer said:

Yes. I’m a working person.

I come within my own definition of a working person, which is earning my living, paying my taxes and knowing what it means to save money, and when you do save money, not wanting to use that money to get out of a cost-of-living crisis which is of the government’s making.

Labour has suspended one of its candidates after reports that he shared pro-Russian material online, Aletha Adu reports.

David TC Davies, the Welsh secretary, has admitted that Labour is on course to win a large majority. In an interview with Harry Cole from the Sun, he said:

I look at the opinion polls right, can’t hide, can’t run away. They don’t always get it right. They never get it 100% right. But they’re clearly pointing at a large Labour majority. I don’t know how large that will be. But you know, I’m not stupid either. You cannot dismiss every single opinion poll.

Davies also said that, while the Conservative government was unpopular, there was also a lot of unhappiness with politicians generally.

Davies’ comment about Labour winning is just a statement of the obvious. But politicians on course to lose elections normally find it hard to admit things that are obvious, and Davies’ cabinet colleagues have generally not been as blunt as this.

Q: When you say having a majority of SNPs would give you a mandate to start independence talks with Westminster, are you talking about a section 30 order to allow a referendum?

Swinney says a referendum would be the best way forward. That would be the focus of the negotiations he would start, he says.

At the last election the SNP won 48 of the 59 seats available.

The number of seats has been cut, and at this election there are only 57 seats. A majority of seats would be 29.

Yesterday Ipsos MRP poll suggested the SNP are on course to win just 15 seats, although other polling results suggest they might do much better.

And that is the end of the Q&A.