General election live: Faiza Shaheen resigns from Labour party after being blocked as candidate | Politics

The SNP is challenging Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer to explain what public services would be cut under their plans in tonight’s ITV debate.

In a statement, Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s leader at Westminster said:

The Tories and Labour party are both wedded to austerity cuts, Brexit, creeping privatisation of the NHS and denying Scotland’s right to choose our future. In contrast, the SNP will always stand up for Scotland’s interests and protect our NHS.

At tonight’s debate, Sunak and Starmer must come clean with voters and admit where the axe will fall in their damaging plans for billions of pounds in cuts to public services. They aren’t being honest with families in Scotland over the damage they will do to our NHS if they slash funding.

And they must end the conspiracy of silence on Brexit and admit the damage they will do to the cost of living, businesses and the economy – under their plans to stay out of the single market.

The government has set out headline spending plans for future years that have been criticised by economists as unrealistically low. If the plans were for higher spending, the government would not be able to say it was on course to meet its target of getting the national debt falling in the fifth year of the forecast period. Labour has also said it will accept these plans as a baseline. But the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a leading public spending thinktank, has repeatedly said both parties are not being open with voters about the challenge the next government will face. In an analysis published recently, largely backing up the SNP argument, it said:

If we look at the big fiscal picture, the next government effectively has three options. It can implement the spending cuts baked into existing plans – cuts that will inevitably be painful. It can implement tax rises – over and above those already in the books. Or it can borrow more – something that is highly unlikely to be consistent with a promise to stabilise debt as a share of national income. The parties might well be reluctant to tell us which of these they would opt for upon taking office. That does not mean that we should refrain from asking them.

It is perfectly possible to make a principled case for each of these options. It is perfectly reasonable to hope for more economic growth, and highly desirable for parties to present plans for how they would aim to deliver it. But there is no escaping the tough fiscal realities facing the UK. For a party to enter office and then declare that things are ‘worse than expected’ would be fundamentally dishonest. The next government does not need to enter office to ‘open the books’; those books are transparently published and available for all to inspect. We should use them as the basis for an open and robust discussion during the election campaign.

Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has had what seems to be a milkshake thrown over him in Clacton, Harry Horton from ITV reports.

According to the Sun, it was a banana milkshake from McDonald’s.

Vaughan Gething claims he is looking forward to no confidence vote in his leadership in Senedd

Steven Morris

Vaughan Gething, the Welsh first minister, has said he is looking forward to taking part in tomorrow’s no confidence vote in the Senedd.

The Tories have tabled the no confidence motion in Gething following weeks of scrutiny on him for taking a £200,000 donation for his Welsh Labour leadership campaign from a company whose owner has been convicted of environmental crimes.

At first minister’s questions in the Welsh parliament today, Gething said:

I look forward to the debate, which I will attend. I could and should, in my view, have been elsewhere, but I will be in this parliament to respond to the debate.

Gething rejected claims that accepting the donation was poor judgement and insisted it was the Welsh Tory leader, Andrew RT Davies’ judgement that was off for backing Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. He said: “I am confident about tomorrow.”

The three opposition parties in the Senedd have said they will back the Tory motion but it is likely to be voted down by Labour.

Rhun ap Iorwerth, the Plaid Cymru leader, said he believed the people of Wales had lost confidence in Gething and there was “genuine anger” over the donation.

Faiza Shaheen, the Labour leftwinger who was blocked from standing as the party’s candidate in Chingford and Woodford Green, has announced that she has resigned from the party. In a statement posted on X, she says that she has faced “a relentless campaign of unfair treatment, bullying and hostility” and that that the party’s decision to block her shows the views of local members “mean nothing” to the party’s leadership. She goes on:

I cannot, in all conscience, continue to contribute to a party that seems to think so little of people like me and has moved so far away from my values.

Shaheen has already she is considering running as an independent in the constituency and she says she will make a further announcement about her next steps tomorrow.

Today’s letters page in the Guardian contains multiple letters from people denouncing the way Shaheen has been treated by the party.

Darren Rodwell, the controversial leader of Barking and Dagenham council, will not be confirmed by Labour on Tuesday as the party’s local parliamentary candidate after a series of allegations about his behaviour, Kiran Stacey and Jessica Elgot report.

Farage claims Tories and Labour ‘not genuinely patriotic’ as he tells Clacton crowd it’s ‘most patriotic town in Britain’

Ben Quinn

Nigel Farage has told crowds of supporters who gathered in Clacton – the Essex constituency where he is to make his eighth bid to become an MP – that minds of the young were being “poisoned” in schools as he pledged to stand against what he described as “woke nonsense.”

The newly-appointed leader of Reform UK (he appointed himself) pledged to bring investment and jobs to the area, home to some of the most deprived communities in Britain, and claimed that the Tories and Labour were not “genuinely patriotic.”

Farage recalled canvassing with the area’s former Ukip MP Douglas Carswell – without mentioning the bitter falling out between the two men – and went on to claim that the Conservatives had “betrayed the trust” of Brexit voters.

“These people, unlike you in Clacton are not genuinely patriotic people. They don’t believe in Britain and the British people in the way you do,” said Farage, who described Clacton as “the most patriotic town in Britain”.

Farage returned to a bugbear voiced when he announced his U-turn on standing in the election – that half of young adults do not know what D-Day was – describing it as a source of shame. He went on:

It is as if we are telling our youngsters to be ashamed of our past and not proud of our past and this has happened under Labour and Conservative governments.

We want to put voices in Westminster who truly believe in Britain We don’t want the minds of our kids being poisoned and to tell them that actually hey should be proud of this country.

Green party condemns Farage as ‘a crook and a conman’

Andrew Sparrow

Hi. I’m Andrew Sparrow, taking over from Yohannes Lowe.

As Nigel Farage, the new Reform UK leader (and longstanding owner – he is the majority shareholder) holds a campaign event in Clacton, the Green party has issued a statement condemning him as

Nate Higgins, the Greens’ democracy and engagement spokesperson, said:

Nigel Farage is not just a dodgy salesman. He is a crook and a conman.

He will package his brand of hate filled politics in a way that is populist and that he thinks he can sell to an electorate who are understandably fed up with mainstream politics.

Frankly though, we’re not buying it.

The latest organisation he latched himself onto, “Reform UK”, is another smokescreen. Set up to take money off people without offering them membership like any other established political party.

Greens can see through these smokescreens and his jovial façade and see the divisive hate that pulsates through his politics.

His politics belong on the extreme fringes not at the heart of Clacton, let alone on prime time TV.

If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line (BTL) or message me on X (Twitter). I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word. If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use X; I’ll see something addressed to @AndrewSparrow very quickly. I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos (no error is too small to correct). And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.

Expert thinktank highlights problems with Tory and Reform UK migration proposals

Rajeev Syal

Dr Ben Brindle, a researcher at the Migration Observatory, a thinktank at the University of Oxford, has spoken after Rishi Sunak announced his party’s commitment to capping the number of visas in an effort to make migration numbers fall year on year in a future parliament.

In a statement, he has highlighted problems both with the Tory proposal to impose an annual cap on the number of visas issued to migrants (see 8.55am) and with the Reform UK plan to bring net migration down to zero (see 9.19am).

Dr Brindle said:

The impact of visa caps depends on how much they actually constrain migration. If the goal is to significantly reduce migration, it is more efficient from an economic perspective to impose restrictive eligibility criteria rather than to get a cap to do most of the work.

With a visa cap, the bar applicants need to reach can change unpredictably depending on how many other people apply during that period. This makes it harder for employers to plan ahead than a scenario where you have predictable but restrictive criteria for getting visas.

The impacts on public finances in the long run depend on how restrictive the eligibility criteria. The salary thresholds introduced earlier this year mean that-at least outside the health and care sector-workers will already be making net contributions to public finances. If caps further reduced the numbers beyond what is already expected to happen, we can thus expect there to be a fiscal cost.

However, it is possible that numbers will already be relatively low in the private sector due to the policy changes, and that a cap would be set at a level that did not make much difference. In other words, it’s all in the implementation.

It is not likely that restrictions on migration would have a major impact on the labour market in the medium to long term. The impacts of immigration in the labour market tend to be small. The main question marks are over the health and care sectors, which are publicly funded and where the government effectively controls pay and conditions.

These sectors have relied heavily on migration in large part due to limited funding. The impacts of restricting migration here would thus depend on whether the government was willing to use other polices (eg. on pay in the NHS and social care) to help recruit and retain staff.

It is difficult to imagine any scenario in which net migration falls to zero, even under extremely restrictive immigration policies. In practice, this would likely mean eliminating almost all work and study migration, and only admitting small numbers of family members of British citizens, as well as asylum seekers (which recent history has showed the government struggles to reduce even despite substantial policy efforts).