Keir Starmer says Sunak’s claim UK has ‘turned the corner’ is ‘form of disrespect’ – UK politics live | Politics

Libby Brooks

John Swinney was in rainy Dumfries this morning, where umbrellas are compulsory and his campaign message about getting rid of every Tory MP in Scotland was again drowned out by questions about the ongoing row over former health secretary Michael Matheson’s ipad bill.

Dumfries and Galloway is of course Scottish secretary Alister Jack’s constituency – and the Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross is pointedly campaigning in Matheson’s own Falkirk constituency today.

Swinney angered opposition members at Holyrood last week when he claimed the sanctions process – which saw Holyrood’s standards committee recommend that Matheson lose his salary for 54 days and be suspended as an MSP after wrongly claiming £11,000 in expenses for streaming football matches on holiday – was “prejudiced”. He also angered some in his own party who can see the row trumping their general election messages.

Swinney stood by his criticism of the process this morning, saying: “It’s been prejudiced by the fact that a Conservative MSP [who sits on the standards committee] made comments about this case and has not recused themselves from deciding on it”.

Although SNP MSPs also sat on the same committee and supported the financial element of the sanction, but not the exclusion period, Swinney denied he was directing them to change their minds when the whole parliament votes on the sanction later this week. He said:

I’m not directing members to do anything. I’m simply saying there’s a flaw in the process that parliament’s got to address.

With the Scottish Tories bringing a separate vote calling for Matheson to resign this Wednesday, this row will continue to offer SNP opponents easy attack lines.

And it’s bigger than a bubble row, cutting through with voters months ago; last November, before this latest iteration of the saga, we had polling showing a majority of voters and a majority of SNP voters thought Matheson should resign.

Steve Baker, the Northern Ireland minister, has in effect disowned the Conservative party proposal for compulsory military service.

In a message on X, responding to a tweet from the Mail on Sunday columnist Dan Hodges, who pointed out that a defence minister highlighted problems with a national service policy in a Commons statement last week, Baker said national service was Tory policy but not government policy.

It’s a Conservative Party policy.

The Government’s policy was set out on Thursday

And he complained that he had not been consulted.

I don’t like to be pedantic but a Government policy would have been developed by ministers on the advice of officials and collectively agreed. I would have had a say on behalf of NI.

But this proposal was developed by a political adviser or advisers and sprung on candidates, some of whom are relevant ministers.

National service would be problematic in Northern Ireland because it would imply people being forced to serve in the military (even though, under the Tory plan, serving in the military is only one option, available for a minority). Nationalists and republicans do not feel allegiance to the Crown and during the second world war Northern Ireland was the one part of the UK exempt from conscription.

As RTÉ News reports, Colum Eastwood, leader of the SDLP, the nationalist party in Northern Ireland, has said implementing national service in Northern Ireland would cause chaos.

SDLP leader Colum Eastwood has described plans by the Conservative Party to introduce mandatory national service or volunteering in the community across the UK as “utterly bonkers”, adding it would be “chaos” to try and implement in Northern Ireland

There have been a lot of reports, particularly in the Telegraph and the Times recently, suggesting that Labour’s plan to put VAT on private school fees will lead to some of them having to close. Yesterday the Sunday Telegraph ran a story on its front page saying parents with children at the Alton school in Hampshire were blaming the Labour policy for the fact it is closing this summer (although the school itself does not seem to be saying that, at least not that bluntly, the report implied).

This morning Keir Starmer adopted a conciliatory tone when talking about private schools. (See 10.52am.)

But on Times Radio this morning Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, was more combative. She said it was “a bit desperate” for private schools to blame Labour for their own budget troubles. She said:

Private schools have whacked up their fees way beyond inflation year after year. And I do think it’s a bit desperate that there’s any suggestion that the fact that some schools haven’t managed their budgets particularly well up until now, under 14 years of the Conservatives, is frankly anything to do with a Labour government.

Private schools need to consider how they can manage their budgets, how they ought to cut their cloth. Our state schools have been under enormous pressure in recent years and have had to make some really tough choices. Yet, despite that, [they] are working day in, day out to deliver a brilliant education.

Anyone who has followed what Keir Starmer has been saying even half closely since he became Labour leader will have heard most of what he said in the speech this morning before. But elections are decided people who don’t follow politics closely, who can tune out of Westminster politics quite happily for 4/5 years at a time, and campaigns are when leaders have to make their pitch to this audience. That was what Starmer was doing today, and although policy-lite (at least in terms of new policy), it was message-rich.

The full text of the speech is here.

Starmer also took a lot of questions from journalists, and answered them confidently, if not always candidly. It remains to be seen whether Rishi Sunak will subject himself to the same scrutiny, and if so whether he will emerge as unscathed.

Here are the main points.

• Starmer insisted that voters could trust him on security – “economic security, border security and national security”. (See 9.54am.) Two weeks ago Rishi Sunak gave a major speech arguing that Labour could not be trusted on defence. This was a solid response.

• Starmer in effect cited his policy U-turns as evidence that he would put the interests of voters first. The Conservatives argue Starmer cannot be trusted because he has abandoned some of the leftwing policies he backed when running for Labour leader in 2020. One argument that Starmer has deployed in response to this is to say that most of his pledges still apply. But the other argument is to say that he deserves credit for aligning with public opinion, and this is what he claimed today. He said in his speech:

I took this Labour party four and a half years ago and I changed it into the party you see today. I was criticised for some of the changes I’ve made – change is always like that, there are always people who say don’t do that, don’t go so fast – but whenever I face a fork in the road, at the Crown Prosecution Service, in my work in Northern Ireland, and especially here in the Labour party … it always comes back to this, the golden thread: country first, party second.

In a long profile of Starmer published in the Telegraph on Saturday, Pat McFadden, Labour’s national campaign coordinator, made the same argument, only rather better than Starmer himself did this morning. McFadden said:

I think one of the things he’s been somewhat unfairly attacked for is lots of U-turns. There have been changes in position, but I don’t think they’ve been random. There has been a thread of direction that unites them, which is that, every time he’s met a fork in the road or a point of inflection, he has chosen the path that brings Labour closer to the public.

• Starmer said he was brought up in a rural town, Oxted, which is “about as English as it gets”. Coming over all Thomas Hardy at one point, he told his audience this morning:

Like everyone, I imagine my character is shaped by where I started in life. I grew up in a small town, not a million miles away from here, a place called Oxted on the Surrey-Kent border.

Similar to Lancing, minus the sea. And should you go to Oxted, some of you could stop off if you’re travelling back to London, you will see a place that, in my opinion, is about as English as it gets.

A mix of Victorian red bricks and pebble-dashed semis while all around you have rolling pastures and the beautiful chalk hills of the North Downs.

I loved growing up there. You could make easy pocket money clearing stones for the local farmers, that was actually my first job. And you could play football until the cows came home – literally. At my first football club, Boulthurst Athletic, we shared our home pitch with the local cows.

It’s part of why I love our country. Not just the beauty – or the football – also the sort of quiet, uncomplaining resilience. The togetherness of the countryside. That is the best of British.