Rishi Sunak says Farage’s Ukraine comments ‘only play into Putin’s hands’ – UK election live | General election 2024

The Labour party leader, Keir Starmer, has said Nigel Farage’s comments on the reasons behind Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were “disgraceful”.

Nigel Farage claimed in a BBC Panorama interview that “we provoked this war”, while drawing a link between Nato and European Union expansion in recent decades and Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade neighbouring Ukraine.

Speaking to reporters during a campaign visit in London on Saturday, Starmer said:

On the question of Farage, his comments were disgraceful. Anyone who is standing for parliament ought to be really clear that Russia is the aggressor, Putin bears responsibility, and that we stand with Ukraine, as we have done from the beginning of this conflict, and parliament has spoken with once voice on this since the beginning of the conflict.

I have been really clear that we stand with Ukraine, I have been really clear that we are unshakeable in our commitment to Nato because this is about defending Ukraine, but it is also about defending our hard-won democracy and freedom, and anybody standing for public office ought to understand that.

Britain’s shadow foreign and defence ministers have told Kyiv that little would change when it came to British support for Ukraine if Labour won the general election.

The shadow defence secretary, John Healey, has said Labour backed all the commitments made to Ukraine by the current government, including a recent pledge to provide Kyiv with £3bn of military aid a year, which a future Labour government would continue.

Richard Adams

Richard Adams is the Guardian’s education editor

The next government faces “unpalatable” choices between raising tuition fees, making direct grants or capping student numbers to rescue universities in England from their financial black hole, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned.

The thinktank said universities that relied on teaching UK students for the bulk of their income were most vulnerable, calculating that undergraduate tuition fees would now be £12,000 if they had kept pace with inflation, rather than the £9,250 rate frozen since 2016.

Josh Hillman of the Nuffield Foundation, which funded the report, said:

The incoming government faces an unpalatable legacy that parties have not confronted in their manifestos.

Higher education funding needs a drastic overhaul, it is just a question of who pays for it – graduates or taxpayers. It seems this unpopular message is one that no one wants to deliver ahead of a general election.

We have some more comments from Rishi Sunak, who has been speaking with the media in London.

Labour has maintained its poll lead of up to 20 points and many constituency-level surveys point to a near wipeout for the Conservatives.

Sunak, who is now reportedly at risk of losing his own seat of Richmond and Northallerton, said Labour should not be allowed to “sleepwalk into Number 10” amid claims colleagues are focusing on preventing a Labour “supermajority”.

Earlier this month, the defence secretary, Grant Shapps, signalled a change in Tory electoral strategy by saying the Conservatives were fighting to prevent Keir Starmer winning a “supermajority” even bigger than Labour’s 1997 landslide victory.

When asked by broadcasters if he was “deluded” for thinking he could win the election, Sunak said on Saturday:

Of course I’m going to fight hard until the last day of this election because there is a choice for the country.

Continue having your taxes cut with the Conservatives, providing you with that financial security, protecting your pension, getting down immigration. The alternative is handing a blank cheque to the Labour party, and once you’ve handed them a blank cheque you won’t be able to get it back. And that means your taxes are going to go up by thousands of pounds.

Don’t let Labour sleepwalk into Number 10, scrutinise their plans, ask what it means for you and your family.

Can you really afford Labour’s thousands of pounds of tax rises? I want to keep cutting your taxes. That’s the choice that everyone has in front of them in a couple of weeks’ time.

The UK’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has said Nigel Farage was “completely wrong” to say the west “provoked” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

During an election campaign visit in London on Saturday, the prime minister told reporters:

What he said was completely wrong and only plays into (Vladimir) Putin’s hands.

This is a man who deployed nerve agents on the streets of Britain, who’s doing deals with countries like North Korea. And this kind of appeasement is dangerous for Britain’s security, the security of our allies that rely on us and only emboldens Putin further.

Speaking to BBC’s Panorama on Friday evening, Farage said: “I stood up in the European parliament in 2014 and I said: ‘There will be a war in Ukraine.’ Why did I say that? It was obvious to me that the ever-eastward expansion of Nato and the European Union was giving this man a reason … to say: ‘They’re coming for us again,’ and to go to war.”

The Reform party leader has faced a stream of criticism since making the remarks, including from the former defence secretary, Ben Wallace, and the home secretary, James Cleverly, who said that Farage is excusing Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Water companies in England have come under mounting criticism for the level of raw sewage being discharged into rivers and seas (data revealed raw sewage was discharged for more than 3.6m hours last year, a 105% increase on the previous 12 months).

Both the Labour party and the Lib Dems have stepped up their attacks on what they have framed as the Conservative sewage scandal.

Labour, which says waterborne diseases have “put over 10,000 people in hospital” since 2019, has reiterated its pledge to put water companies dumping sewage into UK rivers and seas under special measures to force them to “clean up their act”.

The party highlighted new analysis of NHS hospital admissions data showing the number of people diagnosed with diseases transmitted via waterborne infection nearly doubled over the last two years, rising to a record high of 3,261 cases last year.

The steepest increase was in the number of typhoid fever cases, which doubled to more than 603.

Labour shadow environment secretary Steve Reed said:

It is sickening that the Conservative sewage scandal has put over ten thousand people in hospital.

They just folded their arms and looked the other way while water companies pumped a tidal wave of raw sewage into our rivers, lakes and seas, putting the nation’s health at risk.

It is time for change. The next Labour government will put the water companies under special measures and strengthen regulation to force them to clean up their act.

We will give the regulator tough new powers to make law-breaking water bosses face criminal charges and ban the payment of their multimillion pound bonuses until they clean up their toxic filth.

The Lib Dems, meanwhile, set out a plan to save chalk streams, which the party’s analysis suggested suffered nearly 49,000 hours worth of sewage dumping in 2023 – more than double the previous year.

The streams, which spring from underground chalk reservoirs, are one of the world’s rarest freshwater habitats and are found primarily in the south of England and Yorkshire.

The Lib Dems repeated its proposal to launch a public consultation within the first 100 days of the next government which could see rivers and lakes awarded a new Blue Flag status to protect them from sewage dumping, the PA news agency reports.

Lib Dem leader, Ed Davey, said:

Water firms are destroying our precious rivers and chalk streams all whilst making massive profits. Conservative ministers have let these water firms get away with it for too long, while their toothless schemes have failed to protect swimmers and wildlife.

We need urgent action to save our precious chalk streams from this environmental disaster. The swimmers made ill, the wildlife killed and the chalk streams dried up should act as a watershed moment to put an end to the sewage scandal.

Every vote for the Liberal Democrats at this election is a vote for a strong local champion who will tackle the sewage scandal and clean up our rivers, lakes and beaches.

The conservatives have defended their record in government, saying monitoring of water quality has increased and thatthe party has put legal requirements for water companies to implement sewage discharge reduction plans while also“fast-tracking record levels of investment”.

Peter Walker

Peter Walker is a senior political correspondent for the Guardian

Increased disenchantment with the Conservatives could result in the Greens taking two rural seats from the Tories in the general election, a Green co-leader has said, after internal polling showed they were ahead in both constituencies.

Adrian Ramsay said the polling in the seats, including Waveney Valley, which he is contesting on 4 July, demonstrated how recent local election successes had helped the party move beyond its traditional strongholds in urban, Labour-facing seats.

A lot of usually Tory voters “feel deeply left out by a Conservative party that’s torn up the rulebook on standards in public life, and also deeply care about the environment”, Ramsay, who co-leads the Greens in England and Wales with Carla Denyer, told the Guardian.

“Voters in rural constituencies are very connected with the environment, and very angry about sewage in rivers,” he said. “Time after time I’ve spoken to Conservative voters who say they’re thinking about what the future is going to be like for their children or grandchildren and that they’re voting Green for the first time.”

Ramsay said another major worry for wavering Tories was the decline in public services, including a lack of NHS dental services in areas such as Waveney Valley, which straddles Norfolk and Suffolk.

Previous polling has shown that the Greens could win two urban seats: Brighton Pavilion, which the party has held since 2010 under the now departed Caroline Lucas; and Bristol Central, where Denyer could unseat Labour’s Thangam Debbonaire.

Surveys for the party by the pollsters WeThink suggest the party is ahead in its two other major target seats, Waveney Valley and North Herefordshire.

You can read the full story here:

Yvette Cooper has promised to re-establish the Home Office’s Windrush unit, promising a Labour government would “turn the page” on the scandal with a series of measures such as expediting compensation claims.

Writing for the Guardian to mark Windrush Day she said the party would appoint a new “Windrush commissioner” who would “oversee the delivery of the compensation scheme” and be a “voice” for families and communities, adding that trust needed to be rebuilt between Windrush victims and campaigners and the Home Office.

A Labour government, she said, would start by ensuring that the Windrush compensation scheme is “delivered effectively”. It would also restore “community engagements to encourage applications, as well as the reconciliation events promised after the Wendy Williams Lessons Learned review but abandoned by the Conservatives”.

You can read the full story here:

Bloomberg has got sight of some internal Conservative polling this week that confirms public polling that projects a parliamentary majority for Labour as high as 200.

A senior Conservative minister, who was briefed on the polling, said he anticipated election night being like the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest of the first world war, in which more than one million people were killed or injured.

Officials told Bloomberg that over half of the cabinet is at risk of losing their seats, something that would be unprecedented in British electoral history.

It has been reported previously that Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, could lose his seat to the Lib Dems, with fellow cabinet ministers Grant Shapps and Mark Harper among those who could be ousted by Labour.

Alex Wickham, Bloomberg UK’s political editor, wrote:

There are now growing concerns among Tory officials that Sunak’s own constituency of Richmond and Northallerton is no longer completely safe, after one poll implied he could be the first serving premier in history to lose his seat.

The former defence secretary Ben Wallace has been on the Today programme, speaking about Nigel Farage’s comments about the west provoking Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

He said what threatens Vladimir Putin are the values embodied by the EU and Nato, adding that Putin’s “very bizarre view of the world” ignores the fact that Ukraine has been separate from Russia in its history longer than it has been together and ignores the treaties signed by Russia in the 1990s upholding the right for states to choose their own alliances.

Wallace told the BBC:

It is not about Nato. Yes, he wants that to be played across our constituencies and played into the hands of the likes of Mr Farage who is only too keen often to what looks like repeat what looks like some of president Putin’s speaking notes. But certainly that is not the actual historical case.

Farage expanded on his position on Ukraine, writing on X yesterday evening that he is “one of the few figures that have been consistent and honest about the war with Russia”.

Wallace, who is not standing in the upcoming general election, said Farage has been “consistently wrong” on the issue, stressing that Nato is a defensive alliance.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

I think Nigel Farage is a bit like that pub bore we have all met at the end of the bar who often says if ‘I was running the country’ and presents very simplistic answers to actually I am afraid in the 21st century complex problems. It is not that easy to govern a country but also to find international solutions to problems …

If he became prime minister tomorrow morning, what is his solution to dealing with a President Putin that he alleges he admires? A man who remember was involved in the murder of a British citizen Dawn Sturgess with deployment of nerve agent on Salisbury. Is his answer to that we provoked him? He is going to have to deal with the real world.