UK defence spending plan ‘well short of what’s required’ and harder choices needed, says John Healey – as it happened

Earlier I posted some Ipsos polling suggesting that, if Andy Burnham were Labour leader, the party would get a 4-point boost in polling against Reform UK. (See 1.13pm.)

Deltapoll has also sent out some polling today.

Here are the headline voting figures.

Reform UK: 28%

Labour: 20%

Conservatives: 17%

Greens: 13%

Lib Dems: 12%

And here are the figures when people were asked who they would vote if Burnham were Labour leader.

Reform UK: 27%

Labour: 26%

Conservatives: 17%

Greens: 11%

Lib Dems: 11%

So the Deltapoll figures suggest having Burnham as leader could allow Labour to reduce an 8-point Reform UK lead into a 1-point lead, which is within the margin of error.

But, in its news release, Deltapoll includes what it describes as a “really important caveat”. It says:

This does not mean that if Andy Burnham were to become prime minister, we would expect Labour’s vote share to definitely increase by 6%, Labour to draw level with Reform etc. This is a future hypothetical question and us human beings are extraordinarily bad at predicting our own behaviour, particularly in a low information context like a Burnham PM. Nobody (perhaps even Burnham himself) knows the precise details of his position, let alone his policies, when it comes to the economy, the NHS, immigration, the cost of living, Brexit etc.

Deltapoll concludes:

Should Andy Burnham win [the byelection], Deltapoll’s result show there is support among the electorate for the idea of him replacing Keir Starmer as Prime Minister. It is far from clear, however, if Andy Burnham (or anyone else) can actually satisfy the British public’s desire for change. Any Burnham Bounce could turn out to be small and short-lived.

Kemi Badenoch has described the Aberdeen South byelection.

In a post on social media, she said:

Whatever plot twist in Labour’s psychodrama unfolds in the North West of England, it’s a byelection in the North East of Scotland that could be the real game changer.

If Douglas Lumsden and the Scottish Conservatives were to beat the SNP, it would send a lightning bolt of a message to the occupants of Downing Street and Bute House that their war on oil and gas must end now.

And, during a visit to the constituency today, she said:

What people can see is that we can win here in Aberdeen South. Conservatives can win, but we need even people who don’t normally vote Conservative to support us, so that we can send a message to the Labour government and to the SNP that we will back the oil and gas industry.

It’s the only way to send a message by voting for Douglas Lumsden on Thursday June 18. He has lived in Aberdeen all his life, he’s worked in the oil and gas sector, he’s helped to run the council, he’s from here, he cares about the city, as do I …

Everyone is talking about the byelection in Makerfield, that is about one man’s job and one man’s ego, but this byelection is about thousands of jobs.

Jessica Elgot has a good article on who the key figures might be in an Andy Burnham administration. It’s here.

Jess suggests Miliband is in line for a big job. In the i, Caroline Wheeler and Kitty Donaldson are also saying that. But while Jess is talking about Ed being a possible chancellor, Wheeler and Donaldson are talking about David being a possible foreign secretary.

They report:

There were murmurs that Miliband, who’s younger brother Ed is energy secretary, was interested in returning to the House of Commons around the last general election when he repeatedly declined to rule out a comeback.

But the discussions this time are said to centre on a more unusual route: that he might accept a seat in the House of Lords and walk straight into the cabinet as foreign secretary …

“There have been discussions about David returning and it’s an idea that is worth taking seriously if Andy is back in parliament,” said a Labour source.

The one question that obsesses progressive politicians at the moment is how best to campaign against Reform UK and Nigel Farage. Sam Freedman has written about this at length in a post on his Comment is Freed Substack, and it includes polling showing what messages have most impact on potential voting intention. His conclusion is perhaps surprising.

Let’s start with the messages that don’t appear to work. Perhaps unsurprisingly attacking them on immigration has little effect because those inclined to vote Reform are typically willing to take aggressive measures to reduce numbers. Pointing out that millions of citizens could be harmed by proposals to scrap indefintite leave to remain actually increases their vote share. Which is line with other evidence showing that boosting the salience of immigration helps Farage, even if it’s Labour politicians explaining the robustness of their policies ….

What did work was going after Farage on money/class and its impact on his policy choices. A message about the £5m he received from a crypto billionaire and how that had led him to endorse pro-crypto policies pushed Reform’s vote share down by almost four percentage points. Another around Reform’s plans to remove workers’ rights, recently introduced by Labour, pushed it down by just under three points. But the most potent attack line of all was linking Reform’s plans to bring back fox hunting to a general message about them only being interested in the rich (a 4.6 point drop).

Actually, perhaps this should not be so surprising to anyone familiar with Brits and their love for animals. (See 3.50pm.) And it won’t be surprising to any Conservatives who remember the 2017 election, when a casual manifesto promise to allow a free vote on reversing the ban on fox hunting became a big vote-losing liability.

Refugee groups and lawyers have described Conservative proposals to strip judges of their powers to rule on asylum seekers’ appeals against deportations as “an attack on the concept of justice and equality under the law”, Rajeev Syal reports.

Keir Starmer has again insisted that he will fight any challenge to his leadership. At ITV reports, speaking at the G7 summit, Starmer said:

So very many times on my political journey people have said to me ‘it’s not possible.’

They said it’s not possible to turn the Labour party around, it’s not possible to win an election, it’s not possible if you do win an election to invest in your public services and stabilise the economy. Wrong every time.

And that’s why I intend not to walk away from this, but to carry on with what I was elected to do, which is to serve this country and bring back the change that people desperately need in their lives.

Starmer is expected to face a leadership challenge if Andy Burnham wins the Makerfield byelection on Thursday. In a BBC interview at the end of last week, Starmer said he accepted he would have to “turn things around” if he wanted to fight another election as Labour leader. These comments suggest he genuinely believes he could do that.

Many others in his party are not so sure.

A law proposed by Nigel Farage to “strengthen women’s rights” could cost female workers money by removing equal pay for work of equal value, unions have said. Daniel Boffey has the story.

Angela Rayner, the former deputy PM, has dismissed claims that better pay and conditions for young people is bad for their employment prospects.

Before she resigned last year, Rayner was a key figure driving the employment rights bill through parliament. It was described as the biggest boost to workers’ rights for a generation. The government has also overseen a significant increase in the minimum wage for young workers, and has pledged to ensure all over-18s over time get the full adult rate (now paid to over-21s).

Employers have opposed both these developments, claiming they make firms less likely to hire new workers. And last month, when he publised his much-admired report on young people not in education, employment or training (Neets), Alan Milburn, the former Labour cabinet minister, suggested these Labour policies were contributing to the problem.

Addressing the Unison conference this afternoon, Rayner insisted that better wages and conditions for young people were not to blame.

She said:

Let me start with the argument that better wages and conditions for young people are why there are not enough jobs for them, and that we must retreat.

Today, I want to take that argument on. Head on.

I agree that the tide of young people not in employment, education or training is a genuine problem.

But as Alan Milburn found, it is long-term and structural, and has been consistently higher than other countries since long before Labour took office, let alone improved pay for young people.

It’s why we didn’t bring in our changes to the minimum wage overnight but let the Low Pay Commission do its job.

And I’m passionate about getting young people, including those with disabilities or health challenges, into good jobs.

But abandoning our ambitions and making those jobs worse surely cannot be the way to get young people into them.

And this is the wider point. Better quality jobs – with a stronger voice for people at work – is the solution, not the problem.

It is how we build the higher productivity, higher pay economy that we need.