Working-class ‘red wall’ voters decided the last UK election. How do they feel now?

Stefan Rousseau/PA/AP
Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer arrives on board his election bus in Halesowen County of West Midlands, England, June 13, 2024, after unveiling Labour's manifesto in Manchester.

By Katie Marie Davies Contributor

June 20, 2024|TYLDESLEY, ENGLAND


When the United Kingdom heads to the polls July 4, all eyes will be on towns like Tyldesley.

With its tangle of narrow streets and red brick homes dating back to the area’s industrial heyday, Tyldesley is typical of towns across England’s northwest. Labour Party candidate Jo Platt has already spent weeks campaigning here, diligently pushing glossy leaflets into letterboxes and engaging in doorstep conversations with voters.

“We need to give a little bit of hope back to the country. I think that’s what we’ve lost,” she says earnestly, already walking to her next canvassing event. “We’ve lost pride in our towns. If we’re fortunate enough to get into government, then I hope that’s something that we can bring back.”

In 2019 elections, Britons living in “red wall” constituencies felt disrespected by the Labour Party, which helped lift the Conservatives to victory. Now, they may decide the election again – and they feel it’s the Tories who aren’t doing right by them this time.

Labour is campaigning hard here. Once it was all but given that the traditionally left-leaning party would win the votes of working-class, industrial towns like Tyldesley. Then came 2019. The area’s constituency switched allegiances to the opposing Conservatives, ending decades of Labour domination.

Tyldesley was not alone. The 2019 election saw a landslide of small towns across England’s north and Midlands as well as in Wales – an area often described as the “red wall” in honor of Labour’s traditional colors – vote in Conservative members of Parliament, many for the very first time.

The collapse of the red wall was a key factor in pushing then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson to 2019 election victory with an 80-seat majority. But five years later, with Conservative approval ratings rapidly tumbling and Labour looking at overwhelming gains in Parliament, it’s these seats – and accordingly, their voters – that are likely to push Labour across the finish line.

Identity and the red wall

The legend of the red wall – and its 2019 collapse – is tightly bound to an idea of British political tribalism. Throughout the 20th century, northern, working-class voters were seen as loyal Labour devotees, while rural, more affluent areas were judged to be unquestioning Conservative heartlands.

Karen Norris/Staff

The 2019 election brought new political divisions to the fore, with old class divides overshadowed by issues such as Brexit, when the U.K. left the European Union. Many red wall areas – towns that too often felt overlooked and forgotten in a new era of globalization – had voted to leave the EU, but were concerned that Labour would not honor the referendum results. In Tyldesley, the mood soured in the run-up to the 2019 vote. Local Labour councilor Jess Eastoe, who has been handing out leaflets with Ms. Platt, describes being verbally assaulted and spat at.

“The political wrangling over Brexit forced many people to choose between their EU identity [as a ‘leaver’ or a ‘remainer’] and their party identity,” says David Jeffery, a senior lecturer in British politics at the University of Liverpool. “Most studies show that, until quite recently, the EU identity was held much more strongly. Brexit really broke down this strong loyalty toward Labour.”

But that is now changing. As of June 13, just over three weeks before the election, the Conservative Party was polling at just 26% for the Leigh and Atherton constituency of which Tyldesley is part, compared with 50% for Labour. Similar figures are being seen across red wall seats, many of which are projected to fall back under Labour control.

“Of the red wall seats, I’d be surprised if more than a handful stayed with the Conservatives,” Dr. Jeffery says.

“The Conservatives have done nothing”

The Conservatives’ fall from grace across red wall towns has a regional accent. Across Wales and northern England, many voters feel cheated by shortfalls in the government’s “leveling up” plan, a targeted program supposedly designed to help balance regional inequalities between London and other U.K. regions.

Leon Neal/Reuters
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (left) walks with energy secretary Claire Coutinho (right) at the Rough 47/3B Bravo gas platform in the North Sea, June 17, 2024.

The program was a key part of the Conservatives’ promise when they won red wall seats in 2019; at that year’s party conference, then-leader Mr. Johnson vowed that “leveling up” initiatives would repay the region’s trust.

There has been little, however, in the way of results. The government’s flagship plan for a high-speed train line between London and Manchester, HS2, for example, was canceled in October 2023. (The line will instead stop at Birmingham, 100 miles farther south.) Similar policies, such as reducing regional differences in life expectancy or building 40 new hospitals by 2030, have also fallen flat.


Discontentment in towns like Tyldesley also mirrors concerns seen across the country as a whole. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is unpopular, and after a flurry of four Conservative leaders in just over six years – including Liz Truss, who spent just 44 days in office and remains best known for being compared to a lettuce – there is a dearth of likely replacements. Meanwhile, the party’s rhetoric of fiscal austerity is wearing thin after 14 years, particularly against a background of inflation and rising prices.

“The Conservatives have done nothing,” Tyldesley resident Charlotte Steel says when asked who she’ll be voting for in the election. She’s particularly worried about a health and social care system that has been hit by repeated Conservative funding cuts, and says that she’ll be supporting Labour. “This government doesn’t care about people.”

The cost of living in particular is on everyone’s lips. Doorstep issues focus on local infrastructure: People are desperate for more housing, but the new estates being hastily erected are too expensive for locals and serve commuters from nearby Manchester instead.

PA/Reuters
HS2 workers look on as the boring machine Cecelia breaks through after finishing a 10-mile-long tunnel for the HS2 project under the Chiltern Hills, March 21, 2024.

Local schoolteacher Paul Crowther remains undecided, but is already sure that he won’t be voting Conservative either. The party’s leader, Mr. Sunak, is simply out of touch with the needs of local people, he says. “We just need more funding,” he says, “For the NHS and for education.”ing?

It’s voters like Mr. Crowther that Labour hopes to bring back into the fold. In order to do so, its manifesto has introduced new themes, such as pledges to create a “new Border Security Command” and “crack down on antisocial behavior,” as well as plans to recruit more teachers and promises of economic stability.
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Critics have accused the party and its leader, Keir Starmer, of moving away from Labour’s left-wing roots and heading for the political center. Yet the move – a deliberate break from the policies of former leader Jeremy Corbyn, who was seen by many small-town voters as too radical – seems to be resonating.

Mr. Starmer may not be wildly popular, but he is a safe option – and after years of political upheaval and an increasingly disliked government, that might just be a winning formula.

“People are worried about issues that affect this town, like drugs and petty crime,” says Ms. Eastoe, the Labour councilor. “We need to put the boring back in politics. We’re running a country, not a circus.”

Telegraph goes into meltdown with ‘Tory wipeout’ front page

Basit Mahmood 

Today
Left Foot Forward

Labour is predicted to end up on 516 seats, with the Liberal Democrats on 50, while Reform end up with zero seats.

The Telegraph has produced an astonishing front page showing the unprecedented scale of Tory losses which are predicted to take place across the country at the general election, predicting a ‘Tory wipeout’.

The Savanta and Electoral Calculus poll for the paper predicts that the Tories will slump to just 53 seats, with around three-quarters of the Cabinet voted out.

Labour is predicted to end up on 516 seats, with the Liberal Democrats on 50, while Reform end up with zero seats.

The Telegraph reports: “This is the first poll of its kind to forecast Labour to win more than 500 seats. No other poll has predicted that the Tories would win so few seats.

“The polling from Savanta for The Telegraph consulted around 18,000 people between June 7 and June 18, capturing views throughout the last fortnight of the election campaign.”   

Should the poll findings prove accurate, Rishi Sunak would become the first sitting prime minister ever to lose their seat at a general election.

The paper dedicated its entire front page to the results of the poll, producing a map comparing the 2019 results which show constituencies up and down the country covered in blue only to be replaced with a sea of red based on the new poll.

The frontpage has been widely shared on social media, with one user writing: “Extraordinary front page of the Telegraph website this evening. They’ve dedicated their entire first screen to the results of a devastating new poll…”


Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward

ANALYSIS

A silver lining for the UK Tories: it won’t be bad as Canada 1993

WHEN YOU COULD FIT THE TORY CAUCUS 

IN A PHONE BOOTH

KIM CAMPBELL CANADA'S FIRST FEMALE AND SHORTEST SERVING PM

WITH US PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON

IN 1993 KIM BECAME KNOWN FOR HAVING SAID 'ELECTIONS ARE NO TIME TO DEAL WITH THE ISSUES"

19 Jun 2024
AUTHORS
Dr Zain Mohyuddin


There has been much discussion about whether the upcoming election will result in the Tories suffering an extinction-level loss on the scale the Canadian Progressive Conservatives endured in 1993. Zain Mohyuddin writes that the more efficient geographic distribution of the British Conservatives’ support and the less territorialised nature of the British party system suggests the Conservatives will not experience an electoral disaster on the same scale as their Canadian counterparts.

With the Conservatives 20 points behind Labour for the last 12 months, psephologists have speculated whether the Tories will suffer an electoral wipeout on a scale similar to that suffered by the Progressive Conservatives (PCs) in Canada in 1993.

It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of the PC’s collapse. Just five years earlier, under the leadership of Brian Mulroney, the PCs won a second consecutive majority with 43% of the vote. Following the 1993 election, however, they were reduced to two seats in the 295-seat Canadian Parliament.

The Mulroney majorities of 1984 and 1988 were based on an unlikely coalition of socially conservative populists from Western Canada and Quebec nationalists. By the early 1990s, right-wing conservatives, particularly in the West, felt a growing sense of alienation. They believed the PCs had strayed too far in accommodating Quebec’s demands for special status and had pursued policies on bilingualism, multiculturalism, and deficit spending that were at odds with their values. In Quebec, nationalists felt betrayed by the PCs’ support of the Charlottetown Accord – a proposed set of constitutional amendments that failed to pass in a 1992 referendum – which they felt did not grant Quebec enough powers.

Some polls have put the Conservatives at 18%, only two percent higher than the PC’s vote share in 1993. However, there are several reasons to believe that the expected Conservative defeat will not be as dire as the one suffered by the PC.

The PC vote share was geographically highly dispersed and very inefficient. Although they received at least 10% of the popular vote in every province, they did not get above thirty percent in any provinces and were above 20% only in the four Atlantic provinces – the region with the fewest available seats. By comparison, the Conservatives are competitive in many more constituencies. There are 258 seats in which the Conservatives are projected to win are least 30% or more of the vote. In another 51 of the seats they won in 2019, they are 5 points or less behind the leading party.*

Much has been made of Labour potentially regaining the Red Wall and the defection of Conservative voters to Reform. Currently, 14% of 2019 Conservative supporters say they will support Reform, and 12% indicate they will switch to Labour. Of course, one great uncertainty is the 25% of voters who supported the Tories in 2019 but say they ‘Don’t Know‘ how they will vote.

Even if most of these ‘don’t knows’ do not return to the Conservatives, it will still not approach the scale defections the PCs suffered, which reflects, in part, the greater strength of partisan identification among British Conservatives than their Canadian counterparts.** The PCs only retained the vote of only 22% of the voters they had attracted in 1988. They were particularly hurt by the defection of a large group of voters in areas of the country that were crucial to previous victories. In Quebec, 4 out of 5 voters who supported the PCs in the previous election switched to another party, with the majority turning to the newly formed pro-sovereignty party, the Bloc Quebecois. In Alberta and BC, only one in seven voters who supported the PCs in 1988 did so in 1993, with over 40% voting for Reform, whose main concern was the perceived mistreatment of the West.

The Reform Party of Canada received only 19% of the vote nationally but won the second-most seats among the national parties due to its highly concentrated support in Western Canada (see Table 1). The geographically dispersed nature of Reform UK’s support – there are 75 seats in which it is projected to win more than 15% of the vote, but it is not projected to win 25% or more of the vote in any constituencies – means that it is unlikely to come close to achieving the same level of electoral success as their Canadian namesake.

For the British Tories, the threat posed by Reform stems from the prospect of substantial vote splitting on the right, thereby handing many seats to Labour. According to one projection, there are 181 constituencies where the difference between the Labour and Conservative vote share is smaller than Reforms’ projected vote share. By contrast, vote splitting on the right played a far less significant role across Canada in the collapse of the PC. The province where this was the exception was seat-rich Ontario, where the combined Reform and PC vote share in twenty-five seats exceeded that of the Liberals.

The PCs were hurt by the absence of fragmentation of the left, specifically, the collapse in support in Central and Eastern Canada of the country’s social democratic party, the New Democratic Party (NDP). In Atlantic Canada, the region where the PCs received their highest level of support, the NDP had historically done well, but these races were now essentially two-party contests with voters on the left coalescing around the Liberals. So, despite winning 30 percent or more of the vote in 11 constituencies in this region, the PCs failed to win a single seat in any of the four provinces of Atlantic Canada.

One factor that may help British Conservatives is that there a several constituencies where they are competitive, and there is fragmentation on the left. Specifically, there are 9 seats where the Conservatives are projected to win or are 7% within the leading party and the combined vote share of the Liberal Democrats, Labour, and Green is greater than or equal to 50%. This split on the left may hand some seats to the Conservatives. Of course, the extent to which this will occur depends on the level of anti-Tory tactical voting.

In each region of Canada, the electoral threat confronting the Conservatives was different. The threats to the British Conservatives also come on multiple flanks, making it difficult to determine the optimal electoral strategy. Not only do they face the prospect of Reform eating into their support, but also the threat of losing seats to parties on their left. There are 87 seats in which the Labour and the Conservatives contest is a tossup (the leading party’s lead is less than 5% ahead). The Liberal Democrats are also positioned to make significant gains in the South East and South West at the expense of the Conservatives. Of the 50 seats in these regions that the Conservatives won in 2019 and the leading parties are the Lib Dems and the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats either lead or are seven points or less behind in 43.

If the polls are correct, the Conservatives will suffer a cataclysmic defeat on 4 July. There are several similarities between the difficulties they confront and the PC’s dire situation in 1993. However, as dim as the prospects are for the Tories, they are unlikely to suffer an electoral rout on the same scale due to the much more territorialised nature of the Canadian party system. In the 1993 Canadian election, regional issues were highly salient, and whereas the PC vote share was geographically diffuse and highly inefficient, two of their main competitors benefitted from having regionally concentrated support.

Table 1: Percentage of popular vote by province and territory (seats in parenthesis)

Province/Territory	Liberal	Bloc Quebecois	Reform	NDP	PC
Alberta	25 (4)	_	52 (22)	4 (0)	15 (0)
British Columbia	28 (6)	_	36 (24)	14 (2)	14 (0)
Manitoba	45 (13)		22 (1)	17 (1)	12 (0)
New Brunswick	56 (9)	_	8	5	28 (1)
Newfoundland	67 (7)	_	1 (0)	4 (0)	27 (0)
Northwest Territories	65 (2)	_	8 (0)	8 (0)	16 (0)
Nova Scotia	52 (11)	_	13 (0)	7 (0)	24 (0)
Ontario	53 (98)	_	20 (1)	6 (0)	18 (0)
Quebec	33 (19)	49 (54)	_	2	14 (1)
Prince Edward Island	60 (4)	_	1 (0)	7 (0)	24 (0)
Saskatchewan	32 (5)	_	27 (4)	11 (5)	11 (0)
Yukon Territory	23 (0)	_	13 (0)	43 (1)	18 (0)

By Dr Zain Mohyuddin, researcher, UK in a Changing Europe.

A version of this piece also featured on Politics Home.

* A widely used measure of the efficiency of converting votes to seats is calculated by dividing the percentage of seats won by the popular vote received. This creates an index which ranges from zero to infinity with higher values indicating a more efficient vote to seat translation. In 1993, the PCs “efficiency index” was 0.04. Assuming the Conservatives win 22 percent of the national vote and 140 seats, as predicted by the YouGov MRP, their “efficiency index” would be 1.

** According to the 1993 Canadian Election Study, 54% of self-identified Conservatives said their party attachment was either “Very Strong” or “Fairly Strong.” The corresponding figure among British Conservatives was 65%.

 

Just how extreme is Nigel Farage's Reform UK?

Copyright Ben Birchall/PA via AP

By Andrew Naughtie

Published on 19/06/2024 -

A string of embarrassments involving under-vetted candidates has raised red flags about an insurgent force in the UK election, led by Brexit activist and former MEP Nigel Farage.

With just two weeks to go until a snap general election, Britain’s ruling Conservative Party looks set to face what could be its biggest defeat in more than a century.

While the Labour Party is expected to win a landslide victory, much of the credit for the Conservatives’ downfall will be due to an insurgent party to their right.

According to the polls, the anti-immigration, anti-”woke” and culturally traditionalist party Reform UK, led by leading Brexit activist and former MEP Nigel Farage, is set to take as much as 15% or more of the national vote. One poll that showed it leading the Tories by a single point received wall-to-wall coverage, though the lead was within the margin of error.

Farage himself is now running to become an MP for the seat of Clacton, an area that has received national attention mainly for its voters' intensely pro-Brexit views and its atmosphere of economic depression.

It will be Farage’s eighth attempt to get into parliament, and for the first time, he is widely expected to win.

So who are the voters he is trying to win over?

Reform’s pitch appears squarely aimed at a stereotypical older right-wing voter — but according to Paula Surridge, Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bristol, the slice of the electorate currently backing the party straddles the left-right divide more than many commentators acknowledge. 

“The voters Reform have been winning from the Conservatives are most distinctive in terms of having immigration as their core concern,” she told Euronews. “They are particularly hardline on illegal immigration and the 'small boats'."

“In terms of values they are a little more socially conservative than those who have been staying loyal to the Conservatives, but notably more economically left-leaning — something a little out of tune with the party rhetoric and manifesto.”

That manifesto, branded by Reform as a “Contract with You”, is heavily focused on trying to cut taxes and turbo-charge economic growth.

It contains various measures that appear designed to appeal to wealthier voters, among them an extravagant commitment to lift the inheritance tax threshold so that estates worth less than £2 million (€2.36m) are exempted.

The fiscal element of the so-called contract was shredded in an analysis by the independent Institute of Fiscal Studies, which concluded that “even with the extremely optimistic assumptions about how much economic growth would increase, the sums in this manifesto do not add up.”

'Reclaiming Britain': All-out culture war assault

But if these plans sit at odds with many potential Reform voters’ economic views, the manifesto’s other policies are a laundry list of the hardline right’s favourite topics.

Aside from a strident plan to freeze non-essential immigration and impose a punitive levy on businesses that employ “foreign workers”, the contract also pushes for the end of what it calls “woke policing” and a philosophical cleanup of British education.

It would force schools to “ban transgender ideology” while enforcing a “patriotic” model of education, declaring that “any teaching about a period or example of British or European imperialism or slavery must be paired with the teaching of a non-European occurrence of the same to ensure balance.”

The national identity theme even gets its own full page, titled “Reclaiming Britain”, a section that nods towards post-COVID-19 paranoia about the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, and the declining use of cash currency.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage speaks onboard the Reform UK campaign bus in Barnsley, England.Danny Lawson/PA

Alongside proposing two new national holidays to celebrate Welsh and English identity, the manifesto declares it would launch an all-out culture war assault.

“Legislate to stop left-wing bias and politically correct ideology that threatens personal freedom and democracy,” it reads. “No more de-banking, cancel culture, left wing hate mobs or political bias in public institutions. Stop Sharia law being used in the UK.” (Sharia law is not used in the British legal system.)

This, then, is what the party says it wants. But just as telling are the people it has chosen to represent it.

Into the fray, beyond the fringe

Many of Reform UK’s 600-plus candidates were selected in a rush when the snap election was called by Rishi Sunak. This left the party with little time to vet them for problematic past statements, and the results have not been good.

One candidate, Ian Gribbin, was forced to apologise after the resurfacing of old posts on a right-wing news site in which he wrote that it would have been “far better” for the UK to have stayed out of World War II.

“Britain would be in a far better state today had we taken Hitler up on his offer of neutrality ... but oh no, Britain’s warped mindset values weird notions of international morality rather than looking after its own people,” one of the posts read.

He also referred to women as the “sponging gender” and suggested they should be deprived of medical care until the life expectancy gap between the sexes could be closed. He remains Reform UK’s candidate for the seat of Bexhill and Battle.

Another candidate, Jack Aaron, has had to defend comments in which he described Hitler as a “brilliant” man according to “Socionics”, a fringe pseudoscientific theory of personality types. Again, he remains a candidate.

One Reform candidate who has actually stood down is Grant StClair-Armstrong, who, it was revealed, had previously urged readers to vote for the openly racist British National Party.

Apologising for his comments, which Reform itself condemned as “unacceptable”, StClair-Amstrong was insistent that: “I am not a racist in any shape or form, outspoken maybe. I have many Muslim friends, three of whom refer to me as Daddy.” Politico reported that he did not appear to be discussing his children.

Farage and his de facto co-leader, Richard Tice, have blamed these incidents on the supposed failures of a third-party vetting contractor, against whom they say they are considering legal action. However, it has transpired that the party, in fact, used Vetting.com, which is not a vetting agency but an automated paid-for platform to which users can upload information themselves.

Nonetheless, Farage has suggested an establishment “stitch-up” may be to blame.

But aside from the plethora of candidates that Reform insists it did not have time to vet properly, there is the matter of what Farage himself has said since the campaign began. 

When Prime Minister Rishi Sunak left a D-Day commemoration ceremony early, shocking his allies and outraging much of the nation, Farage used an interview to complain that the UK’s first premier of Asian descent “doesn’t understand our history and our culture”.

Called out for his remarks on air by a BBC interviewer, Farage insisted his point was that Sunak is “utterly disconnected by class, by privilege, from how the ordinary folk in this country feel”.

Farage as the wrecking ball (again)

The extent to which all of this matters depends largely on the result Reform get on 4 July — and on what Farage does next. 

According to the polls, Reform is set to take as much as 15% or more of the national vote. One poll that showed it leading the Tories by a single point received wall-to-wall coverage, but the lead was within the survey’s margin of error.

Yet this polling surge may not directly translate into any meaningful number of seats.

Under the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system, a party’s national share of the vote is essentially irrelevant. Instead, each seat is represented by the candidate who wins the most votes within the constituency, however small their share might be.

This does not seem to bother Farage, who originally claimed he was not planning to run at all. His entrance into the fray has boosted his party, and he is increasingly open about his goal of destroying the Conservative Party in its current form.

Depending on how reduced that party is in size after 4 July and who leads it into its years out of power, he may yet be admitted to its ranks himself.

And if he makes it through to a leadership contest, the grassroots party members who make the final decision might well give him a chance to run the show.

Euronews contacted Reform UK for comment, but the party did not respond at the time of publication.

UK Politics

Billionaire Tory donor John Caudwell switches allegiance to Labour

HE WILL GET ALONG SPLENDIDLY WITH SIR KEIR; THE RED TORY

John Caudwell had given Boris Johnson £500k to take on Jeremy Corbyn

Barney Davis
INDEPENDENT UK

JUNE 18,2024

Phones4u founder John Caudwell (PA)

The billionaire founder of Phones4U who donated £500,000 to the Tory party in 2019 has switched his support to Labour in a fresh blow to Rishi Sunak’s stuttering election campaign.

John Caudwell has said he will be voting for Labour citing his amazement at Sir Keir Starmer’s transformation of the party.

Mr Cauldwell was one of the biggest donors to the Tories ahead of the 2019 general election, when he gave half a million pounds to Boris Johnson’s campaign.

Encouraging everybody to vote for Labour, Mr Caudwell said he was “amazed by how Keir Starmer brought it back from that Corbyn brink.”

Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (PA Archive)

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said he was “delighted” that Mr Caudwell had “thrown his support behind the changed Labour Party”.

He said: “The message is clear: business backs change and economic stability with Labour, and rejects five more years of chaos and decline with the Tories.

“John was not just a Conservative voter but a substantial donor to the Conservative Party in 2019 – so it’s not a decision that he will have taken lightly.

“But it’s clear that he shares my plan for growth that I set out in the Labour manifesto.

“I’m campaigning non stop between now and 4 July to win the votes of other people who have backed the Tories in the past but see change with Labour as the best future for Britain.”

Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives are heading for a record defeat on July 4, according to a mammoth poll from Ipsos (PA Wire)

Mr Caudwell said he had supported the Conservatives for 51 years but had been “despairing” about their performance for many years.

He said: “Only five years ago, I donated half a million to the Conservatives to help avert the disaster that would have been Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street.

“But I’ve been increasingly critical of Tory failures since then, particularly over Rishi’s mismanagement of the economy during Covid, Boris’ lowering of ethical standards and, of course, associated with that the accusation that Tory cronies benefited improperly regarding Covid PPE – and then the Liz Truss debacle.


“Over the last two years especially, I have been amazed by how Keir Starmer has transformed the Labour Party and brought it back from that Corbyn brink.

“As I have always said, the Government must be much more commercially minded to grow GDP in order to finance the public services that benefit all of society without increasing taxes.

“When Labour launched its manifesto last Thursday, I was delighted to see that accelerating economic growth was front and centre, and that projected growth is clearly tied into making Britain a clean energy superpower.

“So, I can declare publicly that I will vote for Labour, and I encourage everybody to do the same.

“We need a very strong Labour government that can take extremely bold decisions and you can rest assured that I will be doing my best to influence them wherever I can, in putting the great back in Britain.”

The setback came as Rishi Sunak was warned he is “fighting the wrong campaign” after placing his hopes on Boris Johnson stave off an election meltdown.

Flock of sheep flee as Rishi Sunak and David Cameron try to feed them. 

(Ben Birchall/PA Wire)

The prime minister today took a trip to southwest England in a bid to rescue seats from a pincer movement by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK on the right and Labour and the Liberal Democrats on the left.

But as Mr Sunak was openly mocked by his rivals amid images of him speaking on hay bales and sheep running away when he tried to feed them, former chancellor George Osborne, who ran the winning election campaigns in 2010 and 2015, heaped criticism on the beleaguered prime minister.

Osborne said: “He should be trying to defend his blue wall seats which is where Labour are now running riot rather than focusing on the red wall seats that Boris Johnson won five years ago when, by the way, the Labour candidate was Jeremy Corbyn so it was a completely different election from having Sir Keir Starmer.”

In a bad day for Mr Sunak, two more polls delivered further bad news with Savanta finding that only one in five voters (21 per cent) believe his promises on reducing immigration, with 27 per cent thinking Labour were more likely to stop the boats.