Keir Starmer refuses to rule out putting up capital gains tax – general election TV Q&A live | General election 2024

Starmer is now taking questions from the audience.

Q: What will you do for disadvantaged people in Grimsby?

Starmer rattles through a list of Labour policies. He says he wants to work with people like the people living here.

Q: Some people think you are boring. Tell us something that will change people’s mind.

Starmer says he believes in service. He worked in Northern Ireland, and he was head of the CPS. And after that he chose to go into politics because he believes in public service. His wife wanted him to get a well-paid lawyer’s job.

Q: What do you fear?

Starmer says he is only worried about the impact of his job on his teenager children.

He is not afraid of difficult decisions. He relishes the chance to change the country, he says,

I don’t fear the big decisions … In fact, I relish the chance to change our country.

Rigby says Starmer is in the top 2% of earners.

Q: Would you be happy to pay more tax?

Yes, says Starmer.

I accept I earn a lot of money in the job I have now. But when I grew up, my dad was a tool maker.

The reference to his dad being a tool maker prompts a laugh – because it is something Starmer mentions so often.

He pushes on, talking about how he grew up in a family without much money. It means he understands people in the same situation now. And that is no laughing matter, he says.

Q: What about capital gains tax? If you make that equal to income tax, you could raise £14bn. That must be attractive?

Starmer says that won’t be in Labour’s manifesto.

Rigby says in 2021 Starmer told her in an interview that Labour was looking at wealth tax options.

Starmer says he is not looking at wealth taxes.

He repeats the point about nothing in the manifesto requiring tax rises.

Rigby says “if it’s not ruled out in the manifesto, it’s on the table”.

Q: No taxes in the next parliament?

Starmer says no tax rises are required by Labour’s plans.

And he says Labour won’t put up income tax, national insurance and VAT.

Rigby says when Starmer talks about “no plans” for other tax rises, that implies there will be some.

Starmer repeats the point about Labour ruling out certain tax rises.

Q: Labour in Wales has reviewed council tax bands?

Starmer says some people pay too much in council tax.

Rigby says the last council tax valuation was when she was a teenager. And now she is really old, she jokes.

Starmer again sidesteps the question.

Q: What about fuel duty?

Starmer says Labour has supported the fuel duty freeze in the past.

Q: Did you mean it when you said Jeremy Corbyn would be a great PM?

Starmer says he was certain at the time that Labour would lose the election.

He campaigned for Labour and he wanted to be a good colleague, he says. But he was certain Labour would not win.

Rigby says he has not answered the question. She asks again – did he mean it?

Starmer repeats the point about being certain Labour would lose.

Rigby says this is a trust issue. People want to know whether he was telling the truth.

Starmer repeats the point about wanting to be a good colleague, campaigning for colleagues.

Beth Rigby says Starmer told people Jeremy Corbyn would be a good leader, he campagned for a second referendum, but does not talk about Brexit now, and ditched his leftwing policies. Why should people trust him?

Starmer says, when you lose an election, you must listen to the people.

And when you lose that badly, you don’t look to the voters and say, ‘What on earth do you think you were doing?’ You look at your party and say we have to change.

Q: You accept you have a trust issue?

No, says Starmer. He says he does not accept that. He has changed his party, he says.

Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, is being interviewed on Sky News ahead of the leaders special. He says when Grant Shapps suggested this morning that Labour was going to get a supermajority, that was a deliberate attempt to stop people voting for the party. He explained:

This is a deliberate calculation to try and persuade millions of people who are undecided … that change is inevitable and therefore you don’t have to go and vote for it.

Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are facing their second big TV event of the election campaign, starting at 7.30pm. It is not a debate, and they are not technically going head to head, but they are both facing a Q&A grilling in the same place (Grimsby), on the same evening, by the same people. When it finishes at 9pm, the pundit class will be opining who won.

Sky News are hosting the event, which they are calling a leaders special.

Beth Rigby, Sky’s political editor, will interview each leader for 20 minutes. As viewers who saw her Partygate interview with Boris Johnson will remember, Rigby is no pushover, and she is more comfortable than most broadcasters with the ‘Why are you so useless?’ style of interrogation. After Rigby has had her go, the leaders will then take questions from the audience for 25 minutes, with the Sky presenter Sarah-Jane Mee helping to compere.

Keir Starmer is going first. After he has had his 45 minutes, Rishi Sunak is up.

After it’s over, I will bringing reaction and analysis.

The Liberal Democrats are calling for schools to be given extra money to provide more help to pupils who are acting as carers for relatives. The party is promoting the idea in a party election broadcast going out tonight which features Ed Davey, the party leader, talking about his own experience as a carer – for his dying mother, when he was a teenager, and now for his severely disabled son.

In a news release, the Lib Dems say there are more than 50,000 children with caring responsibilities in England who could benefit. They says:

Close to three in 10 (27%) young carers miss school, with many dealing with increased pressure on their time due to their caring responsibilities. Research has also shown that a young carer is twice as likely to be unhappy compared with other children.

Introducing a young carers pupil premium would provide more money for schools to help the estimated 54,000 young people currently balancing their caring responsibilities with their education. The extra funding would be in line with the current pupil premium which provides £1,480 per primary school child and £1,050 per secondary school child.

The funding could be used to help identify young carers and provide them with additional support such as tutoring and booster classes.

This would form part of an “education guarantee” for young carers, including ensuring that all schools have a young carers lead and policy.

The funding forms part of an £365m proposed boost to the pupil premium, which gives extra funding to schools to improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged children. The Lib Dem plans would see the pupil premium extended to 17-18 year olds and the pupil premium plus extended to children in kinship care. It means an additional 450,000 children would benefit from the pupil premium, taking the total to over 1.3 million pupils in England.

The pupil premium was a policy introduced by the coalition government at the insistence of the Lib Dems.

Campaigners have expressed concern about research showing that proportion of election candidates who are women has fallen since 2019.

At the last election 34% of candidates were female. But now that is down to 30% – less than a third.

50:50 Parliament, which campaigns to get a proper gender balance in parliament and which produced the figures, said they were a disappointment.

In a news release, the campaign group said:

Although 50:50’s #AskHerToStand campaign has helped raise awareness of the issue and encouraged more women to put themselves forward, the final figures are much lower than anticipated. This is, in part, due to the increase in Reform candidates who are predominantly male, but all of the major parties are down on female candidates, or making very slow progress, compared to 2019.

Here are figures from the group showing for all the main parties showing what proportion of their candidates are female.

Labour: 47% (down from 53% in 2019)

Conservatives: 34% (up from 31%)

Liberal Democrats: 28% (down from 30%)

Greens: 44% (up from 41%)

SNP: 39% (up from 34%)

Reform UK: 16% (not standing in 2019)

Lyanne Nicholl, CEO of 50:50 Parliament, said:

We have around 34 million women and girls in the UK and a vast pool of talent within that number. That we have fewer female candidates being selected than four years ago is worrying.

In the last parliament only 226 women had seats in the commons, meaning there were two times more men than women. To prevent this becoming an ongoing issue for future parliaments, we must address now any obstacles for women in the candidate selection process.

Men still dominate the corridors of power, and without rightful representation, women’s views and perspectives will continue to be missed. We need to put pressure on each party to reach equal representation, and women’s voices and lived experiences need to inform decisions that will impact women in the UK.