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May claims strengthening UK union has been 'explicit priority' for her government - live news
Tory leadership: May warns her successor not to undermine Good Friday agreement - live news
(32 minutes later)
May challenges a journalist who asks about increased support for independence. She says the SNP actually lost support at the 2017 election.
And that’s it. The speech and Q&A are over.
I will post a summary soon.
Q: What advice would you give to your successor about dealing with Nicola Sturgeon?
May criticises Sturgeon for dismissing her speech before it was even delivered. Sturgeon should focus on day to day issues that matter to people in Scotland, she says.
Q: Which of your successors will be best for the Tories in Scotland?
May refuses to answer.
Q: You accept Gordon Brown’s analysis about the state of the union. So when will there be another independence referendum?
May says the the SNP government should stop obsessing about independence and focus on governing.
Q: Is there an explicit threat to the union from no-deal?
May says she has always stressed the need to maintain the union. She thinks her successor will want to do the same.
Q: Will no-deal end the union? And is that a risk worth taking?
May says she thinks the government can deliver Brexit and strengthen the union.
May says not enough thought has gone into how the UK government supports the union.
She says she has asked Lord Dunlop, a government minister, to review what more the UK government can do to ensure that it works in a way that strengthens the union.
It will be for her successor to take this work forward, she says. But she says both Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt support the idea.
May says the SNP accused her of using Brexit to claw back powers from Holyrood. She says that claim was “absurd”. But it also showed how complicated implementing Brexit would be.
She says the Welsh government was willing to compromise with the UK government over how powers being repatriated from Brussels would be distributed. But the Scottish government was not, she says.
She says that is because, while others are willing to work with Westminster, the SNP government is not.
An SNP Scottish government will only ever seek to further the agenda of separation. That is a fact of political life in the UK at the moment.
May says the Irish border, and the need to protect it, was a major obstacle to getting a Brexit deal agreeing.
She defends the “backstop insurance policy”, saying it respected the compromise in Ireland agreed by the Good Friday agreement.
She says it will be for her successor to find a solution. But she says there must be no “false choice” between respecting the Belfast agreement (her term for the Good Friday agreement - the unionst term) and delivering Brexit. Any solution must do both, she says.
May says her successor must not advocate an Irish border policy that would put the Good Friday agreement at risk.
May says delivering a Brexit that protects all parts of the UK has been a priority for her. She says her failure to achieve this is a source of regret.
May says safeguarding the union will take longterm work.
Two things are essential, she says.
First, the government has to deliver Brexit.
And, second, the government must do more to bind together the different countries of the UK.
May says she attended the D-day commemorations. She says there is no better example of the nations of the United Kingdom achieving something by working together.
And she says the bail-out of the banking system after the 2008 crash was only possible because of the size of the UK economy.
May says the Scottish independence referendum was meant to settle the matter for a generation.
May says the Scottish independence referendum was meant to settle the matter for a generation.
But Nicola Sturgeon asked for another vote just three years later. May says she said no because she thought that was wrong. It will be for her successor to decide what to do next, she says.
But Nicola Sturgeon asked for another vote just three years later. May says she said no because she thought that was wrong. It will be for her successor to decide what to do next, she says.
BBC News are giving up on their live coverage of the May speech after about 10 minutes.
BBC News are giving up on their live coverage of the May speech after about 10 minutes.
But there is a live feed at the top of the blog.
But there is a live feed at the top of the blog.
Theresa May is speaking now.
Theresa May is speaking now.
She says that when Gordon Brown spoke recently about the United Kingdom union being more at risk than at any time in the last 300 years, he spoke for many people.
She says that when Gordon Brown spoke recently about the United Kingdom union being more at risk than at any time in the last 300 years, he spoke for many people.
The stage is ready for Theresa May's speech in Stirling pic.twitter.com/RAjf5RlTBz
Theresa May will be giving her speech on devolution in Scotland soon.
According to an extract released in advance, she will say:
I am confident that whoever succeeds me in 10 Downing Street will make the nnion their priority.
He will be building on work done over the last three years, during which time strengthening the union has become an explicit priority of government.
The job of prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland brings with it privileges and responsibilities which you only really feel once the black door closes behind you.
One of the first and greatest is the duty you owe to strengthen the Union.
To govern on behalf of the whole United Kingdom.
To respect the identities of every citizen of the UK – English and Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish.
And to ensure that we can go on facing the future together, overcoming obstacles together, and achieving more together than we ever could apart –a union of nations and people.
Election strategists are forever coining new terms to describe the electoral demographic they are targeting: Mondeo man, Worcester woman, hardworking families, the JAMs (‘just about managing’) etc. They are not always exactly the same people, but they are roughly, and it is easier just to call them floating voters.
But now, in an interview with the Spectator, Boris Johnson has coined a new term for this constituency: Oppidan Britain. It’s a university term for townie, but, as James Forsyth and Katy Balls explain in their interview, it is more specifically an Eton term. Here’s the key extract from their article.
The salvation of the Tory party, [Johnson] says, will be focusing on the wider problems exposed by Brexit. ‘Loads of people in parts of rural Britain or urban, Oppidan Britain found a sense that their lives and their futures weren’t as important,’ he says. ‘That is totally wrong. There is a big, big opportunity to bring the country together.’ So he’s pitching himself as the candidate for the disenfranchised rural folk and city dwellers of Britain.
The word ‘Oppidan’ of course has resonance among Etonians. Boris was a King’s Scholar there (the non-scholars are called Oppidans) and a pitch for the ‘left-behind’ Oppidans of the Tory party might literally mean reaching out to David Cameron, Rory Stewart and Oliver Letwin (all Oppidans).
Dominic Raab spent more than £50,000 on Facebook advertising during his failed bid for the Tory leadership, more than all his rivals combined, PoliticsHome reports.
EXCL Dominic Raab massively outspent his rivals on Facebook ads during failed Tory leadership bidhttps://t.co/L774lZ6zGF
Here’s a question from below the line that it would be helpful to answer up here.
ANDREW
The High Court Judgement on the prosecution of Mr. Johnson was supposed to have been handed down yesterday morning.Do you have any information on this?
This was listed on the agenda yesterday, but I did not see any reporting of the judgment, and so I did not post on it.
But you can read the full judgment here.
Administrative Court written judgment handed down today following the hearing and decision on 7 June: Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson -v- Westminster Magistrates Court & Others https://t.co/R8Sj811QYX
And the New European has got a summary here.
It’s ‘pose with an animal’ day on the Tory campaign trail.
Boris Johnson has been visiting a farm in Yorkshire.
And Jeremy Hunt is in Surrey.
At Tory leadership election hustings Boris Johnson is fond of saying he reduced knife crime in the capital when he was mayor of London, and that it is now rising again under his successor, Sadiq Khan. In an interview on LBC this morning Khan, the Labour mayor, was asked to defend his record. He said that knife crime has been going up across the whole country, not just in London. And he said that during Johnson’s first term in office, from 2008 to 2012, he was getting extra money, first from the Labour government and then from the coalition anxious not to cut police numbers before the London Olympics. Khan went on:
So the cuts to London’s police numbers really began in earnest in 2012, and it takes some time for the cuts in preventative services to see the light of day. You don’t overnight, when you close youth centres, see crime going up. ... The point is this: violent crime did start going up in 2014 onwards and one of the reasons is the cuts started biting then, not just in London but across the country.
The Local Government Association, the cross-party body which represents councils in England and Wales, has challenged the government to publish its green paper on adult social care within the next 10 weeks. Responding to the report from the Lords economic affairs committee report for an NHS-style system of free personal care, funded by the taxpayer, the LGA also offered to host cross-party talks on finding a solution to the funding crisis.
In a statement Ian Hudspeth, the Conservative leader of Oxfordshire council council and chair of the LGA’s community wellbeing board, said:
Councils are having to make incredibly difficult decisions within tightening budgets and cannot be expected to continue relying on one-off funding injections to keep services going. What is needed is funding certainty for both the immediate and long-term.
That is why the government needs to commit to meeting our 10-week deadline, before the party conferences start, to finally publish its much-delayed and long-awaited green paper outlining what the future funding options and possible solutions to this crisis are.
Local government stands ready to host cross-party talks to kick-start this process and make sure we get the answers and certainty we need, so that people can continue to receive essential care and support.
Jeremy Corbyn has joined those criticising the prospect of George Osborne replacing Christine Lagarde as head of the International Monetary Fund.
George Osborne, architect of UK austerity, and the IMF, leading global enforcer of austerity, would be a dangerous combination. We need to build a new global economic order for the many, not continue imposing destructive policies on behalf of the few.https://t.co/Li4nuPNiV8
David Lidington, the Cabinet Office minister and Theresa May’s de facto deputy, has told the World at One that a no-deal Brexit would make the break-up of the United Kingdom more likely. Asked if the UK could survive as one country in the event of no-deal, he replied:
I think the UK would be under much greater strain in the event of a no-deal.
Lidington also said the union was under greater strain than at any point in his lifetime. He went on:
The threat to the union, in my view, comes not just from Scottish nationalism, or pressure for Irish unification, it comes from indifference amongst English opinion to the value of the union.
I think there is a sense in which we take the union for granted.
And sometimes I think there are too many people in England, including in my party, who assume that you can be dismissive of the contribution that Scotland or Northern Ireland makes.
Lidington was speaking ahead of May’s speech in Scotland on devolution, which is due at about 5pm.
