This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen
on .
It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
General election: Boris Johnson says public projects must prioritise hiring British workers after Brexit – live news
General election: Boris Johnson says public projects must prioritise hiring British workers after Brexit – live news
(32 minutes later)
The prime minister delivers the first big set-piece speech of the campaign as Labour pledges £26bn extra per year for NHS
The prime minister delivers the first big set-piece speech of the campaign as Labour pledges £26bn extra per year for NHS
Johnson says 1.4m businesses have been created in the UK since 2010.
Nigel Farage, the Brexit party leader, is now saying that he could not vote Conservative on the basis of what they have done this week. Earlier he suggested he might. (See 5.14pm.)
That is more than in France and Germany combined, he says.
Q: Corbyn has ruled out a second referendum next year. Aren’t you misleading the public by saying otherwise. And is not your deal with the Brexit party just as shady as any Labour/SNP cooperation?
He says this is a tribute to the enterprise economy supported by the Conservatives.
Johnson says the Tories do not do deals.
He says the Tories will double funding on research and development in the next parliament, to £18bn.
On what he calls “the Sturgeon/Corbyn alliance”, he says Nicola Sturgeon is Jeremy Corbyn’s “path to power” and his “yoke-mate of destiny”. She wants a referendum next year. So it is hard to see how Corbyn could turn her down.
(He says this will fund work on electric cars, but he is not clear whether all that money is for electric vehicles, or just some of it.)
He says this country has had enough of referendums like this. He wants to get on and get Brexit done, he says.
Johnson says, when the UK leave the EU, the government will insist public sector procurement projects hire British workers.
He says the potential of this country is perfectly represented by the electric vehicles being made at this factory. He is going to turbocharge - if you can turbocharge an electric vehicle - the opportunities for this country.
Johnson says British workers will get priority under Tories on public procurement projects after Brexit.
And that’s it. The Q&A is over.
Johnson says people do not know where Corbyn stands on a second referendum. Is he for leave? Is he for remain? Or is his like Schrödinger’s cat, occupying both positions at once.
I will post a summary soon.
He argues that the Corbyn/Sturgeon coalition would be damaging to the UK.
Q: What will it mean if the Brexit party do stand against you?
And he says that delaying Brexit would cost the UK an extra £1bn a month.
Johnson says his deal is read to go. We can slam it in the oven, and be ready to leave in January.
(That is not true, at least for 2020. Under a Johnson Brexit the UK would have a transition period until the end of next year, during which contributions to the EU would effectively continue at the rate they are paid now.)
Q: Have you got a message for Nigel Farage? And why did you refer to onanism in the extracts released last night, when you did not use that word this afternoon?
Johnson claims there is a “pent-up tidal wave” of new investment waiting to flow into the UK once Brexit is done. It would be worth tens of millions, he says.
Johnson says he would urge people to back Conservative candidates.
He says his Brexit is ready to go. Just add water, and stir the pot, he says.]
And he says the “onanism” reference was in a “stray early draft” of his speech.
(He seems to be comparing Brexit to a Pot Noodle.)
Q: (From the Daily Mail) Earlier today Jeremy Corbyn questioned the US government’s account of the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. [Er, not quite - see 4.28pm.] What is your reaction?
Here is the extract from the speech released in advance.
Johnson says it is unrealistic to think Baghdadi could have been captured. He says he does not know the details of what Corbyn said. But if it is as the questioner suggested, Corbyn is being naive.
Johnson says LEVC, the electric taxi company where he is speaking, represents the future.
Q: What would you do to restore council budgets?
The economy has grown solidly for nine years, he says.
Johnson says the government is putting more into social care, because that is where the real pinch is. But the best way to support councils like Coventry is to support the economy, so that the tax base is there.
And he says unemployment is at its lowest level since 1974.
Q: David Gauke says if you win, that will be bad for the UK. Why should people trust you to lead the country when people who worked with you in cabinet don’t trust you?
Boris Johnson has just started giving his speech. He is at a factory in Coventry that makes electric taxis.
Johnson says he leads a one nation government. He wants to deliver on the people’s priorities. But the problem at the moment is that parliament won’t push Brexit through.
He says these taxis are symbolic of the type of politics he represents.
He says he would say to Gauke, unless the Tories have a working majority, there will be a coalition led by Jeremy Corbyn and “years of paralysis”.
He wants to drive change, he says. And he claims he was the midwife of these vehicles.
Q: Will you apologise to the flood victims?
Here is Stewart Wood, a Labour peer and a policy adviser to Ed Miliband when he was Labour leader, responding to Len McCluskey’s comments on free movement. (See 1.30pm.)
Johnson says the emergency services have been working flat out to help people. Being hit by a flood is a terrible thing. A huge amount of work is going on.
Who’s making promises they can’t keep and who do the voters trust to spend their money? To try and figure this out, Heather Stewart is joined on the Guardian’s Politics Weekly podcast by the Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott, Momentum’s national coordinator Laura Parker, and professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London Tim Bale.
He says it is important for people to understand what financial compensation is available.
In an interview with LBC Jeremy Corbyn was asked about the killing of the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, by US special forces in Syria last month. Corbyn replied:
He says the UK needs to invest in flood defences. Some £2.6bn has already been put in, he says. But there is “much more work to be done”.
In response the Conservative party has put out a statement from the security minister Brandon Lewis claiming that Corbyn’s comment shows his “inability to stand up to people who reject our values” and that: “Every time [Corbyn] is given the opportunity to take the side of this country’s enemies he does so.”
Johnson is now taking questions.
But it is hard to see how Corbyn’s quote does amount to siding with Baghdadi. Even President Trump, announcing Baghdadi’s death, said that capturing or killing him were both objectives for the US armed forces.
Q: You have been criticised for your handling of the floods, and you have got former Tories running as independents. Are you in control of this campaign?
ITV has some footage of Boris Johnson speaking to residents in Doncaster about the flooding. When Tory MPs chose him as their leader in the summer, some of them thought he had a magic touch with voters. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence of that from the video footage we’ve seen of him today (although of course that’s not to say Theresa May would have been any better).
Johnson says he has visited the flood areas twice now. He pays tribute to how people are coping. The government is ready to do what it can. No one can over-estimate how terrible this is for people, he says. Where there are gaps in insurance, he will sort it out, he says.
Alastair Campbell, the former communications director for Tony Blair who was expelled by Labour in the spring for voting Lib Dem in the European elections, has said that he will be campaigning for David Gauke, the Tory-turned-independent pro-European, in South West Hertfordshire. He told the ITV election podcast, Calling Peston:
On the campaign generally, he says of course we need to get Brexit done, “because it has been paralysing politics for three years”.
A prominent campaigner for a second referendum, Campbell has also argued on Twitter that it is essential for the pro-remain parties to cooperate.
This is from the Times’ Steven Swinford.
The call from Leave.EU’s Arron Banks for Nigel Farage withdraw candidates in Labour seats to avoid splitting the rightwing vote has been rubbished in Peterborough by the Brexit party candidate, Mike Greene, who told the Guardian: “I have never been driven by Arron Banks.”Labour squeaked to victory in the marginal by just 683 votes in the June byelection but only after the Conservatives and Greene gathered 17,044 votes between them - 6,560 more than Labour’s Lisa Forbes. Greene, a multi-millionaire businessman who is campaigning in a Brexit party-branded Land Rover Defender with personalised plates, predicted that far from allowing the Conservatives to win if he stood aside, as hundreds of Brexit candidates did in Tory-held seats on Monday, Labour would increase its majority.“I am not going to step aside for party politics,” Greene said while campaigning in the pro-leave ward of Werrington.
Johnson says he will make Britain the greatest place on earth.
Voters in Peterborough appear in confusion with some Brexit party voters saying they will switch to Conservative, and Labour voters switching to Lib Dem and Conservative depending on Brexit allegiances. Many others are losing faith with parliament to deliver whatever they vote and considering abstaining. Labour is hoping it can focus on the impact of austerity on public services rather than Brexit, to bolster its slim lead.
We should get on with it, he says, instead of wasting 2020 on two referendums.
Greene admitted Brexit would mean “you are going to go through some pain” but dismissed as biased a recent study by economists at Kings College London and London School of Economics suggesting annual economic losses of up to £2,500 per capita after a decade. He said:
He asks people if they want to wake up on 13 December and find a Corbyn-Sturgeon “technicolour coalition of chaos”.
Plaid Cymru is today calling for for the establishment of a national health and care service, with social care provided free at the point of need.
Johnson says it it technical breakthroughs, like the ones being promoted by this factory, that will enable the UK to cut carbon emissions.
On social care, we do seem to be getting closer to the point where the parties are reaching consensus on the need for a national care service. Yesterday the IPPR thinktank published a report calling for free personal care to be introduced in England, at a cost of up to £10bn. The IPPR is a leftwing thinktank, but its recommendations were quite similar to those from the House of Lords economic affairs committee in a report this summer, and that committee is chaired by Michael Forsyth, who was about the most Thatcherite member of the cabinet when the Tories were in power in the mid-1990s. Labour has already proposed a “national care service”, and it is due to publish further details of how this might work soon. And there are rumours that the Conservatives will offer something similar. Plaid may be pushing at an open door.
From the New Statesman’s Jeremy Cliffe
At his news conference this morning John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, said that 95% of taxpayers would not pay higher rates of income tax or national insurance under Labour. (See 11.23am.) Sajid Javid, the chancellor, signalled last week that the Conservative manifesto will include tax cuts.
But the Resolution Foundation, an economic thinktank, has published a report (pdf) today on tax policy saying that, whoever wins the election, tax increases will be likely. Here is an extract from the summary in its news release.
The Tories have not announced their plans yet, but there is speculation that the party will propose lifting the national insurance threshold, to bring it into line with the income tax personal allowance. “This would give most workers a tax cut of up to £480, at a cost of £11bn,” the report says. But it says low-income families would not get much benefit from this. It explains:
The Liberal Democrats are now looking for a new candidate in High Peak after their original candidate, Guy Kiddey, said people should vote Labour, the BBC’s Chris Doidge reports. High Peak is a Labour/Tory marginal.
Kiddey was angry about his party not standing down in Canterbury. (See 10.02am.)
The Conservatives have claimed that Jeremy Corbyn is “in complete disarray’ over Scottish independence in the light of his comment this morning, and the subsequent briefing clarifying the party’s stance. (See 1.21pm.) Stephen Kerr, the Scottish Conservative candidate for Stirling said:
