The BBC’s Ian Watson just said on Today that Labour voters living in leave areas will “likely see a very different style of campaign” from the party over the next two weeks, as “the Lib Dem threat was overestimated, while the willingness of leave voters to switch from Labour to the Conseravtives was underestimated”.
More Labour activists are set to be moved into leave areas, he said, and that shadow cabinet members backing a leave deal rather than remain will be given a higher profile. The message will be that a new referendum won’t be a “back door” initiative to remain in the EU, Watson added.
Laura Duffell from the Royal College of Nursing told Sky’s Breakfast show this morning that she and her colleagues had doubts about the 50,000 extra NHS nurses that were promised in the Conservative manifesto.
“I’d really like to know where the 50,000 nurses are coming from. [...] If there are 50,000 nurses out there, why do we not see them already? It’s not an overnight fix,” Duffell said.
"I would really like to know where the 50,000 nurses are coming from."
Laura Duffell from @theRCN says there is no "overnight fix" to cope with the lack of nurses in the NHS, saying there needs to be more investment.#KayBurley at #Breakfast
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks just spoke about the widely reported incident on the London underground from a few days ago, where a Jewish family was subjected to antisemitic verbal abuse from a man, before other passengers intervened. The man was later arrested. “The hero was a young Muslim woman wearing a hijab,” Sacks said. “She chose to identify with the Jewish family.”
“She chose not to be a bystander but chose to confront racism head on,” he added.
Labour’s Barry Gardiner is on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Quizzed on the YouGov MRP poll result and Labour’s reported change of tactic, with the aim to convince more Labour leave voters, Gardiner says he hasn’t heard of anything about a change in campaign tactics.
He says the margins have “narrowed” in recent weeks, and that Labour is the only party trying to unite the country around a compromise: a final say on any Brexit deal.
This from Sky’s Tamara Cohen:
Senior Labour figure tells me campaign will see "shift of focus" rather than change of strategy in vulnerable seats.
Tells me campaign so far too focused on votes going to Lib Dems. Now need to convince North/Mids voters Labour "has a plan for real change" and is "on their side"
Labour know that it will be hard, if not impossible to attract voters who consider Brexit the be all and end all.
But they're banking on big pool of Leave voters in marginals wanting to know which party will help their day-to-day lives, and believe in some seats all to play for
On @talkRADIO talking about the MRP this morning - seems striking that it seems more in line with other polling than last time, and that there are so many Tory-leaning seats looking so marginal. Poll could be completely correct and we still end up with a hung parliament.
This from Prospect editor Tom Clark, who is urging caution:
1/ Yes @YouGov did well last time with their model, but having just spent the evening with a whole bunch of pollsters and political scientists, the interest this one exercise is attracting worries me
2/ as it happens, their projected headline number of Con seats is very close to what I put in the office sweep stake. So I certainly aren’t saying it’s wrong. Only that I don’t know, and neither do they
3/ as the fella who wrote the notorious Guardian front page on Election Day 2015 (headline: “it couldn’t be closer”!) I fear we’re still to absorb the real lessons of that trauma for the pollsters and pundits
4/ Lesson 1 of 2015 is that it’s no use having more data if you’re data is biased. Back then, inspired by the cult of Nate Silver & his state-by-state stuff, we had loads of constituency polls and seat-by-seat projections that turned out to be tosh
2/ Detail: Many seats are tight. A 3 point swing would deprive Johnson of a majority. Plus poll was taken over 7 day period, so may underestimate recent tightening. But here’s the biggest problem with the MRP method…
3/ MRP takes "what are middle class professionals in general saying" and turns it into "what are middle class professionals in Wimbledon going to do on 12 Dec". It cannot account for local factors like candidate, history of seat etc. But...https://t.co/PSQiqK6kTN
4/ MRP quite good for showing momentum: how are middle class professional men changing their votes? So here's some takeaways for progressive voters and activists...
5/ A progressive government is entirely within reach: either Lab/SNP/PC/G or the same with Libdem backing. Because BXP is effectively backing the Tories, this becomes a highly tactical election....
6/ What it cannot become is a referendum on Brexit. On the doorstep it's very clear that most Labour voters are prioritising NHS, crime, housing over Brexit. I feared it *would* become a proxy referendum but it is not...
Labour has expressed concerns about the BBC’s political coverage after it was revealed that Boris Johnson has still not confirmed whether he will subject himself to a cross-examination by Andrew Neil.
Jeremy Corbyn’s team agreed to take part in the series of one-on-one interviews with the journalist after the BBC told them the prime minister would definitely be doing a similar broadcast next week. However, a BBC source strongly denied they had told Labour that Johnson had confirmed.
The BBC has yet to confirm the date of Johnson’s appearance, leading to Labour concerns that Johnson could be tempted to sidestep scrutiny from one of the broadcaster’s leading political interviewers.
Nicola Sturgeon responded asking whether Johnson was ducking out because he was a chicken. Jeremy Corbyn supporter and Guardian columnist Owen Jones called it an “absolute disgrace”, saying the BBC had “lied to Labour and said they’d agreed an interview between Andrew Neil and Boris Johnson next week” – a claim the BBC denies, and Labour candidates are piling on.
This is an absolute disgrace from @BBCNews. They lied to Labour and said they'd agreed an interview between Andrew Neil and Boris Johnson next week. If that doesn't happen then no one can ever trust a single word the BBC say ever again and senior figures will have to resign. https://t.co/Kf8CsGpNp9
Seems a fair point. Have to assume Johnson lied once more & BBC executives fell for it. A Johnson govt which they’ve helped facilitate will turn on them as he has so many ‘allies’ in the past. Still time for British people to teach Johnson a lesson https://t.co/IZopNfTld2
Jo Swinson starts the day with a roundtable on homelessness in London and Jeremy Corbyn will be in Southampton to announce the party’s environment policies.
A foreign policy debate, featuring the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, the shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, as well as the foreign affairs spokespersons for the Lib Dems and SNP. If you’re interested, that will be broadcast on Radio 4 tonight.
Tonight, party leaders will participate in a debate on the climate crisis, broadcast on Channel 4. Boris Johnson has not confirmed whether he will be there and Nigel Farage has rejected the invite, but all other parties will be attending.
A quiet day for the Tories, who have no major events or announcements scheduled.
A new poll for the Times points to a thumping Conservative victory. While the Guardian is treating all polls with suspicion, read why here, the MRP poll from YouGov came closest to calling the unexpected result of the 2017 general election.
The poll predicts the Conservatives will win 359 seats (42 gains), leaving Johnson with a majority of 68. Labour, meanwhile, would fall back to 211 seats – a result that would be in line with the disaster of 1983. Not everyone is happy with that message, including Boris Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings who has told Brexit supporters that the general election is “much tighter” than polls might suggest and urged them to persuade their friends to vote Tory.
Good morning politics people. We’re two weeks out from the vote and Labour has taken the gloves off, accusing the Tories of being willing to sell off the NHS. Meanwhile, there’ll be a lot of talk about the climate crisis today, as scientists warn the world may already have crossed a series of climate tipping points, meaning “we are in a state of planetary emergency”.
The official papers reveal US and UK officials have repeatedly discussed dismantling protections that keep NHS drug prices down as part of their negotiations about a post-Brexit trade deal.
The Labour leader, and some experts, say that the official papers put lie to Johnson’s repeated claims that the NHS is not for sale and that healthcare is “not on the table” in trade talks between the two countries. Denis Campbell and Jamie Grierson have unpacked what the dossier says and what it means. Heather Stewart writes that “Corbyn had one central aim as he brandished the 451-page ‘secret” NHS document at a hastily-arranged press conference on Wednesday: to drag the general election debate safely back into Labour’s comfort zone after the antisemitism accusations.
Today will be about the environment. Corbyn will be in Southampton where he will set out the party’s environment policies, arguing that the UK should plant 2bn trees by 2040. One plank of Labour’s energy policy is under fire today, as lawyers have warned that the party’s plans to take large parts of the energy industry back under public control puts it on a collision course with EU laws that guard Europe-owned companies against government takeovers. Later tonight, the leaders of most parties – Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage are the notable exceptions – will participate in a Channel 4 debate on climate issues.
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