UK election updates from June 24: Sunak says he was right about Liz Truss and is right about Labour

Sir Keir Starmer has said Boris Johnson deserves “praise” because on “Ukraine he took a strong position”.

The Labour leader said it was welcome that there had been “unity” between the government and the main opposition party in Britain over supporting Kyiv following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Starmer told The Sun: “The only winner if there was a split in our politics here in the UK [on the Ukraine war] would be Putin. He wanted to see division in other countries.”

Rishi Sunak has said he does not regret promising to “stop the boats” despite his failure to fulfil the pledge, saying: “I want people to know where I stand.”

The prime minister told an election event at The Sun that illegal migration via the Channel was “unfair” and that he wanted to do “everything I can to stop it”.

He conceded that “we haven’t got the job done”, but claimed: “The only way to do that is to make sure that we make it clear to everyone if you come to our country illegally . . . you’ll be removed.”

Rishi Sunak has declared he “won’t hesitate to act” if Conservatives ensnared in the alleged betting scandal are found to have committed misconduct.

Speaking at an election event hosted by The Sun newspaper, the prime minister said the allegations were “really serious matters”.

However, he insisted he was wary of compromising the integrity of the Gambling Commission’s investigation by taking further action against party figures involved in the independent probe before it had concluded.

One of Reform UK’s largest backers during the 2019 election has returned as a donor to the populist party. 

Jeremy Hosking told the Financial Times he donated £125,000 to the party last week. He previously said he would no longer support the party in this campaign having donated more than £2.2mn since it was launched in 2019. 

Earlier this month, Hosking offered Conservative candidates £5,000 each if they signed up to a raft of pledges set out by the rightwing Reclaim party that he founded, but only four accepted. 

Company bosses should be “terrified” of a Labour government, business secretary Kemi Badenoch said on Monday.

Labour’s “new employment regulations are going to make it very hard to hire, strangling employment”, Badenoch said in a debate against Labour counterpart Jonathan Reynolds at Bloomberg’s City of London headquarters.

Labour has proposed a “new deal for working people” that would boost workers’ rights, giving day-one rights to employees, restricting the use of zero-hour contracts and rolling back the Tories’ anti-trade union legislation.

Reynolds argued that under Labour, which has a large lead in opinion polls, the “floor will rise” on the baseline level of workers’ rights. But, playing down the impact on those running enterprises, he added that “the vast majority of businesses are operating to a higher standard than those sets of proposals”.

The leader of the Democratic Unionist party has warned that absentee voters risk “helping to elect MPs who will take Northern Ireland in the wrong direction”.

Gavin Robinson, who took over as leader of the party in March, was speaking at the launch of the DUP’s election manifesto in Belfast.

Most UK voting intention polls do not include Northern Ireland, so the country is excluded from the FT’s poll tracker, but a June poll by local pollster LucidTalk found that the DUP risked losing its position as the Northern Ireland party with the most MPs in Westminster and winning the same number of seats as republican rival Sinn Féin.

Sinn Féin overtook the DUP in national assembly elections in 2022 to become the first republican party to win the most seats at Stormont.

The Conservatives would stand “full square” behind Scotland’s North Sea oil and gas industry, Rishi Sunak said at the launch of the Scottish Conservatives’ manifesto.

The prime minister on Monday said his party was “committed to new licences [and] more investment in infrastructure and skills . . . to deliver a secure future for the North Sea and its workers”.

“There is only one party with an unequivocal position on the future of our oil and gas industry,” he said.

Labour, Sunak added, would stop all licences and would tax the sector “into oblivion”.

He described the Scottish National party as the north-east’s “great pretenders”, who had opposed new licences and raised taxes on oil workers.

The Scottish Conservatives are in a two-way battle with the SNP across about half a dozen seats in the Scottish Borders and north-east Scotland.

The prime minister has praised the Scottish Conservatives for “standing up” to the Scottish National party.

Launching his party’s Scottish manifesto this morning, Rishi Sunak said “only” Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross and his team had been “prepared to properly stand up” to the SNP. 

“[They have stood] against both Nicola Sturgeon’s gender recognition reforms and the dangerous Hate Crime Act. It shows you that only the Scottish Conservatives have the courage to stand up to the nationalists.

“The SNP have let down Scotland. Their independence obsessions mean that they have neglected everything else,” Sunak added.

Voters will be making their choice on July 4 in a “knowledge vacuum” because the party manifestos provide so little information on big tax and spending decisions, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned.

Paul Johnson, the think-tank’s director, said that the Labour and Tory manifestos provided “thin gruel” when it came to on tax policy, welfare and public spending.

As things stood, spending on many public services would probably have to be cut in the next parliament if debt was to be held in check, the IFS said in an analysis of the manifestos. This was partly because of a £50bn-a-year increase in debt interest spending relative to forecasts and a growing welfare budget.

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey has said his metric of election success is “beating lots of Conservatives” and argued that his party is successfully targeting rural voters who have been alienated by both the Conservatives and Labour.

He told BBC Radio Lancashire: “I’ve been really struck by how many people living in rural areas linked to farming are saying ‘The Conservatives have just betrayed us.’ They aren’t going to vote Labour but they’re thinking of voting Liberal Democrat.”

Asked about his campaign, which has featured stunts ranging from paddleboarding to tackling an assault course, Davey said: “I don’t take myself too seriously but I do take the issues that worry people seriously.”

The Northern Ireland secretary has said the scandal over alleged betting on the timing of the election date is “not great” for the Conservatives but insisted that candidates and staffers caught up in the investigation are “innocent until proven guilty”.

Chris Heaton-Harris, who is not running as a candidate in the election, told LBC that he supported Rishi Sunak’s decision not to immediately suspend those caught up in the scandal.

Asked how damaging the scandal was for the campaign, Heaton-Harris said: “It’s not great because we should be talking about how we’re going to lower taxes, and how we’re going to lower immigration and sort crime out.”

The shadow health secretary has said he has been “disgusted” by the treatment of junior doctors in the UK.

Speaking on the BBC’s Today programme, Wes Streeting said the British Medical Association, which represents medical workers, was willing to negotiate after he said he could not commit to a 35 per cent rise in salary for NHS workers.   

“The BMA has said they are willing to negotiate on pay and on the wider conditions junior doctors experience which I’ve been pretty disgusted by in terms of their placements, rotations . . . I hope we can improve the working conditions of junior doctors,” he said.

Changing the NHS’s funding model and introducing an insurance system for dentistry in the UK would be a “dangerous slippery slope”, Labour has said.

Speaking on the BBC’s Today programme, shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said the issues facing the NHS were not down to the funding model, but were due to “where the money goes”.

Labour has promised to create 700,000 extra dental appointments per year, if elected, to manage the backlog of patients requiring treatment. 

Streeting said if Labour were to win the election, he would “get the British Dental Association in” to start the process of reforming NHS dentistry. 

“We’ve got to deal with the crisis that is staring us in the face,” he added.

The Conservatives have lost up to a third of voters who planned to back the party just four months ago, according to an Ipsos poll for the Financial Times that points to high levels of volatility ahead of the UK election on July 4.

The survey, conducted on the same cohort of almost 16,000 voters at the end of January and at the start of June, found that 32 per cent of people who initially said they would vote Conservative had since changed their minds.

Rightwing party Reform UK attracted 8 per cent of the Tory voters polled, 6 per cent switched to Labour, 7 per cent said they were now undecided and 9 per cent said they were less likely to vote at all.

Read more here.

We’re now less than two weeks away from polling day. The weekend continued to be dominated by the scandal over alleged betting on the election date by Tory staffers.

• The Conservatives’ chief data officer Nick Mason was under investigation by the Gambling Commission for betting on the timing of the general election — becoming the fourth known Tory staffer to be probed over the issue.

• Labour’s national campaign co-ordinator Pat McFadden called on the Gambling Commission to offer “maximum disclosure in the public interest” on its investigation, including releasing the names of all those being probed.

• The Institute for Fiscal Studies said Labour would have to find at least an extra £6bn to £7bn to fund pay deals due immediately after the election to prevent nurses, teachers, and other public sector workers falling further behind their counterparts in the private sector.

• Labour received 15 times more in large donations than the Conservatives in the second week of the campaign, according to the latest data from the Electoral Commission, including a £2.5mn donation from Lord David Sainsbury.

• Author JK Rowling, who has previously donated to Labour, wrote in The Times that she would “struggle to vote” for Sir Keir Starmer’s party due to its position on trans rights.