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General election: 'Real change is coming,' says Corbyn at Labour's campaign launch - live news
General election: Labour would 'immediately' buy homes to house rough sleepers, says Corbyn - live news
(about 5 hours later)
From the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg
Jeremy Corbyn has said that Labour will “immediately” start rehousing the homeless if it wins the election. Speaking at a campaign event in Milton Keynes, Corbyn called the level of homelessness in the UK a “disgrace and insult to our country”, and promised a Labour government would end austerity. As the Press Assocaition reports, he said:
Jeremy Corbyn about to launch Labour campaign in packed out arts centre in London's Battersea - Labour took the seat from Tories in 2017, will hope to repeat the trick in other London seats this time round
On our first day in office, we will immediately buy all the properties necessary to house the rough sleepers.
The Labour campaign launch is due to start at 11am.
Boris Johnson paid an election stop to a primary school in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, where he joined a group of children in an activity sorting pictures of London into past and present, the Press Association reports. The PM held one black and white image aloft and suggested “past?”. One pupil agreed and said it “looks dirtier”, to which the prime minister replied: “That was when Ken Livingstone was running it.”
These are from the BBC’s Peter Saull, who is there.
Referring to a photo of London Bridge, Johnson told the youngsters: “You know what they used to do? They used to stick the decapitated heads of the enemies on spikes.”
At the Labour general election launch. One old slogan, one new. “For the many, not the few” and “It’s time for real change.” #ge2019 pic.twitter.com/ELrvAzM1aV
He also visited a classroom where children were mummifying pumpkins with salt, and another where they made firework collages.
Some interesting t-shirt designs at the Labour campaign launch. #ge2019 pic.twitter.com/6PQHzmBYMK
At the last election the conventional opinion polls turned out to be a very poor guide to the result. On that basis some people argue they should be ignored completely, but the political parties take them seriously, they are better than most other ways of trying to gauge public opinion and even sceptics will admit that they pick up movements in opinion, even if they don’t provide a reliable guide to the final result.
Some very fired up Labour activists in the room. One angrily remonstrating about Boris Johnson, suggesting that the former mayor of London should take some responsibility for failing to prevent the Grenfell Tower tragedy. #ge2019
With that in mind, here are the results of the three polls around today.
Last night Nicky Morgan, the culture secretary, announced that she would be standing down from parliament. In an interview with the BBC’s Radio Leicester this morning, she insisted that she was leaving not “for any reasons of disagreement with the prime minister or the direction of the government at all”.
An Ipsos Mori poll for the Evening Standard gives the Tories a 17-point lead over Labour. The poll also confirms that Jeremy Corbyn’s personal approval ratings remain dismal. The Standard reports:
She said the abuse she had received as an MP had contributed to the decision, adding:
Mr Johnson has the best personal scores of any leader since 2017, with 46 per cent satisfied and 44 dissatisfied — a net score of plus 2.
I think the role of being an MP has changed. I think the abuse, because of the platforms, because of how strongly people feel about the current political situation, that has changed enormously in the almost 10 years since I started.
Conservatives are overwhelmingly happy with their leader, with 80 per cent satisfied and nine per cent dissatisfied.
Here is an updated list of the MPs standing down from the Institute for Government’s Gavin Freeguard.
Mr Corbyn has failed to improve since last month’s record-breaking low personal scores. Just 15 per cent of voters are happy with his performance and 75 per cent are unhappy — a net score of minus 60.
A YouGov poll gives the Tories a 15-point lead over Labour.
A party that in quick succession loses Amber Rudd, Nicky Morgan, Ken Clarke, David Lidington, Philip Hammond, Nick Boles, Jo Johnson and Dominic Grieve has serious thinking to do about its future - if it has one
From the author and political commentator John Harris
A Survation poll for the Daily Mail gives the Tories an eight-point lead over Labour. As the Mail reports, it also gives Boris Johnson a small lead over Jeremy Corbyn on the issue of health. It says:
We were told it would be moderate Labour MPs who would be culled on the eve of the election. Instead it seems to be the Conservative Party that has been taken over by extremists
Asked which leader had the best health policies, 36% of voters said Mr Johnson while 34% opted for Mr Corbyn.
From Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis
We have new Westminster voting intention figures in tomorrow’s Daily Mail. Both Labour and the Conservatives have seen a small increase in support in the past 2 weeks. pic.twitter.com/f2a1TGvql1
This seems to miss the point. It’s not that the numbers are disproportionate. It’s that more of those who cite abuse as a reason fir leaving are female. Either it’s happening to men too and they choose not to say. Or it’s worse for women. https://t.co/ZSY0YXDINf
There is more information here on the Guardian’s election poll tracker.
Even if women are standing down in the same proportion as men, it does look as if the average age of the women who are standing down is lower than the average age of the departing men. Many of the men going are at the end of their careers. I have not had time to do the maths, but that seems to be less true of the women.
I missed this picture earlier. Perhaps Jeremy Corbyn was practising for when he meets the Queen ...
More than 300,000 people have applied to register to vote in 48 hours, according to government figures. As the Press Association reports, a total of 139,162 applications were submitted on Tuesday, followed by 177,105 on Wednesday. This is well above the typical number for weekday applications, which has been averaging around 37,000 for the past month.
The House of Commons has just approved the recommendation from the Commons standards committee for Keith Vaz to be suspended for six months for offering to buy drugs for sex workers. The motion was passed without a division.
There is no sign of Boris Johnson this morning yet, but here, for the record, is the statement he released overnight ahead of the visits he is doing today to a school, a hospital and a police station. He said:
With parliament due to be dissolved at the end of Tuesday ahead of the general election, the decision may have little practical effect. Vaz is under pressure not to stand again as a candidate. (See 9.47am).
Today should have been the day that Brexit was delivered and we finally left the EU. But, despite the great new deal I agreed with the EU, Jeremy Corbyn refused to allow that to happen – insisting upon more dither, more delay and more uncertainty for families and business.
The debate was marked by a bitter exchanges between Andrew Bridgen, a Conservative backbencher, and John Bercow, who is on his last day as Speaker. Bridgen accused Bercow of being biased in favour of Vaz. Bercow denied this and, referring to Bridgen, he told MPs:
We cannot continue along this path. I didn’t want an election - like the country I wanted to get Brexit done, but it is the only way forward.
He can try to smear me, he will get the square root of nowhere.
The public wants and expects the government to give them hope and to improve their opportunities.
Here is a good question from below the line.
This is exactly what my government has been doing for the past 99 days and exactly what my government will continue to do if the public choose the Conservatives in this election.
It's being reported that Jeremy Corbyn has the lowest approval rating of any opposition leader since 1977. But the leader of the opposition in 1977 was Margaret Thatcher, who went on to win three general elections. Am I missing something?
I want next year to be a great year for our country – with more investment in frontline NHS services, the recruitment of thousands more police officers to reduce violent crime and investment in every one of our primary and secondary schools across the country.
You are right, but you are missing something.
The alternative is for the people of this country to spend the next year, which should be a glorious year, going through the toxic, tedious torpor of two more referendums – on EU membership and Scottish independence – thanks to Jeremy Corbyn’s incessant indecision.
It was Sky’s Beth Rigby who put it to Jeremy Corbyn that he has the lowest approval rating for any opposition leader since 1977. (See 11.51am.) She was referring to this Ipsos Mori survey. But I don’t think she meant it in the way you have interpreted it. What Ipsos Mori says is that Corbyn has “the lowest net satisfaction ratings of any opposition leader since the survey began in 1977” - not the lowest rating since the opposition leader in 1977, Margaret Thatcher.
Now is the time to break the deadlock so we can move on as a country. The Conservatives will campaign for a parliament that gets Brexit done and delivers on the people’s priorities, including the NHS, education and crime.
Here are the figures.
And here are the two main points Johnson is making. As is almost routine with Johnson statements, neither of them is properly true.
Boris Johnson has been accused of sitting on a key report assessing the threat posed by Russia to Britain’s democratic processes, the Press Association reports. The former attorney general Dominic Grieve argued voters must have access to the report by the intelligence and security committee, which he chairs, given an election has been called for 12 December. He said it was “unacceptable” for the prime minister to “sit on it”, informing the Commons that Johnson should have confirmed on Thursday that no classified matters were remaining in the report.
Johnson claims that Labour is to blame for parliament not being able to pass his Bexit deal. It is true that Labour voted against the programme motion, setting aside just three days for MPs to debate the bill. But the programme motion was defeated because the DUP (supposedly Johnson’s allies) and former Tories who had had the whip removed voted against it, and Labour offered to strike a deal with the government on a programme motion giving MPs more time to debate the bill, which may well have passed. But Johnson did not try this, and instead shelved the bill and went for an election.
The full story is here.
Johnson claims there would be two referendums in 2020 under Labour. It is true that Labour wants to hold a second Brexit referendum next year, but the party says it would not allow a second Scottish independence referendum in 2020. Johnson is making this claim because Corbyn has not ruled out allowing a second Scottish independence referendum at some point, and its exact timing would be a matter of negotiation between London and Edinburgh.
Johnson accused of withholding key report on Russia from voters
Yesterday the Liberal Democrats sent out a note inviting journalists to a slogan launch this morning. That could be a first. Having covered general elections since the 1990s, I’ve seen poster launches, campaign launches and manifesto launches, but never something billed as an event to announce just a slogan.
After his failure to meet his cast-iron, “do or die” pledge to deliver Brexit by 31 October (today), you might have thought that Boris Johnson would think twice before setting a fresh deadline for Brexit. But he has been at it again. During a visit to Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge, he said if the Conservatives were elected, Brexit would definitely happen by the end of January. He said:
My colleague Peter Walker was there. And it turns out the slogan is: Stop Brexit, Build a Brighter Future.
If you vote for us and we get our programme through ... then we can be out at the absolute latest by January next year.
Peter is not over-impressed.
He also said he had an “oven-ready” Brexit deal ready to go if he won the election.
Lib Dems have a digital sign van outside parliament unveiling two election posters and their campaign slogan, which seems to be, “Build a Brighter Future.” pic.twitter.com/6KL7LmVzJG
This morning the Telegraph splashed on a story saying the Brexit party could stand aside in hundreds of seats - a move that could considerably help the Conservatives, who are at risk from the pro-Brexit vote being split. As Gordon Rayner and James Rothwell report in their story (paywall):
All campaign catchlines are necessarily platitudinous, and as with this, almost always fail the, ‘can you argue the opposite?’ test - ie, no party is going to say, “Actually, no, we want to create a worse future.”**That’s not to say some policies won’t do just this.
Splits have emerged in Nigel Farage’s party over its election strategy, with several senior figures backing the ‘sensible’ option of focusing its resources on a small number of Leave-voting Labour seats that it stands a realistic chance of winning.
Anyway, the Lib Dem slogan van is supposedly due to spend *an hour* driving around Parliament Square. It’s a diesel. As an asthmatic who works a few hundred metres away I’m not overly keen on this.
One senior Brexit party MEP suggested the party could field as few as 20 candidates, while other sources suggested the figure would be nearer 100.
That said, the Lib Dem van did one circuit of the square and was last seen driving towards Lambeth bridge, so maybe there was a change of plan.
Mr Farage, who previously suggested he would field 600 candidates, said on Wednesday night he was still ‘working through’ his options, but there are fears at the top of the party that splitting the Leave vote in marginal constituencies could lead to a Jeremy Corbyn premiership.
Footage of the diesel Lib Dem as van idling before it sets off on its circuits of Parliament Sq. It’s not entirely ideal. As someone pointed out below they could have used @pedalmeapp for the job .... pic.twitter.com/beTWdtuiyv
Asked about the report today, Farage played it down, but did not deny it outright. He told PA Media:
While we are on the subject of the Commons standards committee, MPs will later debate a motion saying they should suspend the Labour MP Keith Vaz, as recommended by the committee, for offering to buy drugs for sex workers.
This is idle speculation. I have not spoken to anyone of any seniority in the party [about this].
In an interview on the Today programme this morning Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary, said Vaz should stand down instead of standing for election again. She said:
The Daily Telegraph: Brexit party could aid Tories by not fighting hundreds of seats #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/uZZgYXoAVI
I think he should consider his position. I think he himself should agree not to be a candidate. It has been a very sad issue, not just for him but for his family and his children.
The Lib Dems have confirmed they are standing aside in Beaconsfield to help Dominic Grieve, the former Tory, run as a pro-remain independent candidate. Rob Castell, the party’s former parliamentary candidate, said it was true that he would step back because of these “unprecedented times”.
When it was put to her that the Labour party has not removed the whip from Vaz, a move that would prevent him from standing again as a Labour candidate, she replied: “Not yet.”
Grieve, a supporter of a second referendum and key architect of the parliamentary battle against no deal, said today:
The Conservative MP Sir Henry Bellingham has been ordered to apologise to the Commons for the late declaration of a financial interest, the Press Association reports. The Commons standards committee found he did not declare his non-executive chairmanship of Clifton Africa Ltd, an African mining and development company, within the 28 days required. In a report the committee said such cases were normally dealt with through a “rectification” procedure, but, despite “extensive” correspondence with the parliamentary commissioner for standards, it said Bellingham had taken “far too long” to correct the record. As a result, the committee said it was recommending that he should issue a written apology to the house.
I will run as an independent. I have no idea what the outcome will be. All I can do is offer myself to my constituents as an individual. If they want me, I’m here to serve. If they don’t, no hard feelings.
The Conservatives argue that Labour’s claim to be offering change (see 9.02am) is bogus because the party is offering another referendum on Brexit. This is what James Cleverly, the Tory chairman, said in a statement last night, responding to the advance extracts from Jeremy Corbyn’s speech released in advance. Cleverly said:
In Grieve’s Buckinghamshire seat of Beaconsfield, he won 36,559 votes for the Tories in 2017, compared with Labour’s 12,016 and 4,448 for the Lib Dems.
A vote for Labour is not a vote for change. It is precisely the opposite - a vote for more delay and uncertainty on Brexit, meaning the government can’t focus on people’s priorities, like the NHS, schools and crime.
At first minister’s questions in the Scottish parliament the Scottish Tories’ interim leader, Jackson Carlaw, immediately asked Nicola Sturgeon if she’d like to thank Jeremy Corbyn for allowing her a second independence referendum.
(But Cleverly also said in his statement that Labour’s “extreme economic ideas would wreck the economy” - which I suppose would be change of a sort.)
(Actually Corbyn was yesterday using the same form of words that the Labour leadership has done since the summer: opposing independence but not refusing another referendum, though not in early years of a Labour government. The trouble is that this contradicts Scottish Labour’s official policy and, like their Brexit stance, isn’t easy to put across on the doorsteps.)
As Heather Stewart and Rowena Mason write in their overnight story, Jeremy Corbyn will use his speech this morning at the Labour campaign launch to assert that his party is on the side of the people.
Sturgeon hit back by asking Carlaw about a story in this morning’s Times, suggesting an electoral pact by Tories and Labour to step back and allow the Lib Dems a clear run in their attempts to oust SNP’s Westminster leader, Ian Blackford, in his Highland constituency, previously held by the late Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy.
This is another standard piece of election rhetoric. You never hear candidates saying that they are on the side of vested interests or the elite (even though some of them are).
She also hit a nerve by telling Carlaw that she sympathised with him, given that his party had so little confidence in him that they used a backbencher’s photo in their election material. This refers to leaflets bearing the face of recently departed leader Ruth Davidson: the loss of her personal voter appeal is something the Scottish Tories are expected to feel keenly during this campaign.
Boris Johnson has been trying his own version of this positioning, with No 10 advisers saying that, because he is campaigning on a pledge to deliver Brexit, he is standing up for the people against parliament.
While Sturgeon hammered her message that only a vote for the SNP could keep the Tories out of Downing Street, and Carlaw pitched the Tory guarantee of no more referendums, don’t expect the electioneering at Holyrood to let up anytime soon ....
Corbyn will say he is standing up for the people against the elite, or the “privileged few’. And in his speech he will name examples of what he means by the elite. It is worth quoting the passage at lengthy so here it is.
Jeremy Corbyn will be pleased with that speech. It had a clear message, it was very well received from the activists in the hall and even the Mail on Sunday’s Dan Hodges, who has cast more vitriol over Corbyn than almost anyone else in the British commentariat, had to concede that Corbyn had done a good job. It did not contain any surprises, but it set out Labour’s platform quite compellingly.
You know what really scares the elite?
Low bar. But that was one of Corbyn’s most effective performances. Boris has a fight on his hands here, especially with the Trump/NHS line.
What they’re actually afraid of is paying their taxes. So in this election they’ll fight harder and dirtier than ever before. They’ll throw everything at us because they know we’re not afraid to take them on.
The key points from the speech are summarised at 9.02am and at 9.24am.
So we’re going after the tax dodgers. We’re going after the dodgy landlords. We’re going after the bad bosses. We’re going after the big polluters. Because we know whose side we’re on.
As usual, the more unexpected stuff came in the Q&A. Here are the main points.
So are you on the side of the tax dodgers, who are taking us all for a ride? People who think it’s ok to rip people off, hide their money in tax havens so they can have a new super yacht. Or the children with special educational needs who aren’t getting the support they deserve because of Tory and Lib Dem government cuts?
Corbyn said the election was not about him personally. In response to a question about his own personal extremely low approval ratings, he said it was not a “presidential election”. It was Labour’s platform that mattered, he said. He replied:
Whose side are you on? The dodgy landlords, like the Duke of Westminster, Britain’s youngest billionaire, who tried to evict whole blocks of families, to make way for luxury apartments? Or the millions of tenants in Britain who struggle to pay their rent each month?
It’s not about me. It’s not about any individual on this platform. It’s not a presidential election ... It’s about each and every one of us standing as labour candidates - the Labour shadow cabinet or any other position - with all the diversity that we’ve got and all the different life experiences we bring to this country and to our party and to our parliament.
Whose side are you on? The bad bosses like Mike Ashley, the billionaire who won’t pay his staff properly and is running Newcastle United into the ground? Or his exploited workforce, like the woman who was reportedly forced to give birth in a warehouse toilet because she was terrified of missing her shift?
There is a lot of truth in this. People do vote for candidates and parties, not individual leaders, and at the last election Labour performed far better than was expected by people who thought that Corbyn’s leadership would be the decisive factor. But elections do decide who serves as prime minister, and you cannot pretend leadership is irrelevant.
Whose side are you on? The big polluters like Jim Ratcliffe, Britain’s richest man who makes his money by polluting the environment? Or the children growing up in our cities with reduced lung capacity because of choking pollution?
He said that he wanted all NHS services to be delivered by NHS employees. In response to a question about whether he wanted to stop some NHS services being provided by private companies, as is the case now, he said it was possible to visit a hospital pharmacy now and find that the staff there were not NHS employees. But they wanted to be NHS employees, he said. He went on:
“Whose side are you on? The greedy bankers like Crispin Odey, who makes millions betting against our country and on other people’s misery and donated huge sums to Johnson and the Conservative Party? Or are you on the side of working people, the people who create the wealth that’s then squirreled away in tax havens?
Yes, I do want our NHS to be one where everyone delivering the services of the NHS are NHS employees, part of the family of NHS employees.
And whose side are you on? The billionaire media barons like Rupert Murdoch, whose empire pumps out propaganda to support a rigged system. Or the overwhelming majority who want to live in a decent, fair, diverse and prosperous society?
He sidestepped a question about how he would vote in the referendum Labour plans to hold after the election offering a choice between remain and a soft Brexit. Corbyn has repeatedly refused to answer this question, fuelling speculation that he might personally remain neutral.
You know whose side Labour’s on. And we have something that the Rupert Murdochs, the Mike Ashleys, and the Boris Johnsons don’t have.
He refused to commit Labour to abolishing public schools. Asked if Labour would get rid of schools like Eton, he said that the manifesto would be decided at a clause V meeting (a meeting of the shadow cabinet, Labour’s national executive committee and union leaders). But he went on:
We have people. Hundreds of thousands of people in every part of our country, who will make this the biggest people-powered campaign in history.
For starters, we will definitely be making sure that all those private schools – public schools as they call themselves – will actually have to pay their taxes in a fair and proper way.
Essentially there are only three sorts of election campaign: ‘it’s time for a change’; ‘give us more time to finish the job’; or (when all else fails) ‘don’t let the other lot ruin it’. The easiest and most effective message is normally the first one (which is why sometimes incumbents even try and run on a ‘change’ platform) and today this is what Jeremy Corbyn will offer the electorate when he launches Labour’s election campaign at an event with the shadow cabinet.
This will not come as any surprise to anyone who looked closely at what Angela Rayner, the shadow education, was promising in her speech to the Labour conference in September. But there was a difference between what Rayner actually promised (integrating private schools with state schools), what the much more radical motion passed by delegates actually promised, and the way Momentum, the organisation for Corbyn supporters, described the significance of the motion. It put out a press release after the composite was carried saying: “Labour commits to abolishing private schools in next manifesto.” From what Corbyn is saying today, it sounds as if the manifesto will not be saying that.
According to extracts released in advance, Corbyn will say:
Corbyn refused to commit himself to serving a full five-year term if elected prime minister.
We stand for the many. Boris Johnson’s born-to-rule Conservatives protect the privileged few. They’ve slashed taxes for the richest and vital services and support for everyone else.
He refused to commit to appoint members of the shadow cabinet to the cabinet posts they currently shadow.
But real change is coming.
He said that he last spoke to Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader and Scottish first minster, about 10 days ago. He implied that, if he were prime minister, he would be better than Johnson at maintaining good relations with other parties.
We will end the Conservatives’ great rip-off by putting rail, mail and water into public ownership so they work for everyone, not just Tory donors and shareholders in tax havens.
I do keep in touch with, obviously, political leaders around the country because that is what leading the party is all about. You know what, when we go into government, it’s going to be so much different and so much better, because we’ll have a different world and a different society and take government that doesn’t try and divide people, but instead tries to bring them together.
We will invest in every nation and region, rebuild our public services and give our NHS, schools and police the money they need by taxing those at the top to properly fund services for everyone.
According to the Times Scottish political editor, Kieran Andrews, Sturgeon was less cordial when speaking about Corbyn at first minister’s questions today.
This election is a once-in-a-generation chance to transform our country, take on the vested interests holding people back and ensure that no community is left behind.
Nicola Sturgeon has just called Corbyn “useless” at #FMQs https://t.co/VpfCqN9nBh
I will quote more from the speech soon. And here is our overnight election story, also covering what Corbyn will say.
Corbyn said he would like the media to “just report what we say”. Talking about the campaign, he said:
General election: Corbyn to position Labour as true 'party of the people'
I’ll be all over the country, meeting people, listening to people and taking that message there. And I ask our media, as good journalists, to just report what we say.
Here is the agenda for the day.
This was just a plea for fair reporting, but it has attracted some comment on Twitter from journalists who have had to put up with complaints from left that reporting what No 10 says amounts to mere stenography.
9.30am: The Lib Dems launch their election slogan, which will be on a poster on a van that will later drive around Boris Johnson’s Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency and Jeremy Corbyn’s Islington North constituency.
After 10.30am: Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the Commons, makes a business statement in the Commons.
11am: Jeremy Corbyn and the shadow cabinet launch Labour’s general election campaign at an event at Battersea Arts centre in south London.
After 11am: MPs debate the standards committee recommendation for Labour’s Keith Vaz to be suspended for six months.
Boris Johnson is also doing election visits today, going to a hospital, a school and a police station in different parts of the country to highlight what he calls “the people’s priorities”.
It is John Bercow’s last day in office as Commons Speaker.
And at some point today the culture department is expected to publish its report into how Johnson’s close friend, the American businesswoman Jennifer Arcuri, secured a £100,000 grant from the department.
As usual, I will be covering breaking political news as it happens, as well as bringing you the best reaction, comment and analysis from the web, although I will be focusing almost exclusively on general election developments. I plan to publish a summary when I wrap up.
You can read all the latest Guardian politics articles here. Here is the Politico Europe roundup of this morning’s political news. And here is the PoliticsHome list of today’s top 10 must-reads.
If you want to follow me or contact me on Twitter, I’m on @AndrewSparrow.
I try to monitor the comments below the line (BTL) but it is impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to answer questions, and if they are of general interest, I will post the question and reply above the line (ATL), although I can’t promise to do this for everyone.
If you want to attract my attention quickly, it is probably better to use Twitter.
