Sir Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak are set to begin a frantic final few days of campaigning as polling day rapidly approaches.

Both men will today reiterate their core messages as they try to motivate their backers to get out to the polling booths on Thursday.

The Labour leader will impress on the nation that if they want change they “have to vote for it” – while the Conservative leader will warn there are “four days to save Britain from a Labour government”.

Election latest – England win gives Sunak hope of glorious comeback

Mr Sunak has suggested that Labour are on track for a “supermajority”, with the opposition having managed to maintain a roughly 20-point lead in the opinion polls, according to the Sky News Poll Tracker – something Sir Keir will do everything to ensure does not change.

The Liberal Democrats are set to continue their push to replace the Tories in seats that have traditionally been considered their heartlands – while the SNP will try to convince Scots to back them as polls show Labour could become the largest Scottish parliamentary contingent once again.

Mr Sunak is set to campaign in the Midlands today, where he will warn against giving “Keir Starmer and Labour a blank cheque”.

Speaking at a rally later, the prime minister will say of Labour: “If they get the kind of majority, the supermajority that the polls suggest, they will set about entrenching themselves in power.

“They will rewrite the rules to make it easier for them to stay in office and harder for anyone to replace them. So, don’t surrender your voice to Labour on Thursday.”

Seemingly in a bid to limit the scale of the defeat, rather than emerge victorious, the Tory leader will say that “an unchecked Labour government would be a disaster from which it would take decades to recover”.

“We Conservatives will stand up for you and make sure your voice is heard, your values represented.”

The Conservative Party is also claiming today that Labour’s immigration plans will result in a “deluge” of asylum seekers, leading to tax hikes of £635 per family each year – something a Labour spokesperson has branded a “ludicrous lie from an increasingly desperate Tory party”.

The opposition claimed the Tories have “completely lost control of the asylum system or border security” and if they are re-elected “the chaos will continue and costs will soar further”.

Labour win ‘not inevitable’ – Starmer

Labour will also vow to ensure petty theft is punished by scrapping a rule allowing people stealing goods worth under £200 to escape punishment, it is understood.

More broadly, the party will continue to make the wider case for change, with national campaign coordinator Pat McFadden saying: “If people don’t want to wake up on 5 July to five more years of economic chaos, to wake up knowing that all the future offers is the same as the recent Tory past, then they have to vote Labour and vote for change on Thursday.”

Sir Keir Starmer also hammered home that message in an interview with The Guardian, saying: “People talk about the inevitable outcome. It isn’t inevitable. I think there’s a yearning for change. But, you know, what we always say, if you want change, you have to vote for it.”

He also told the paper “hope has been kicked out of many people” because of the Tories’ failure to deliver, adding: “There’s a near universal view that almost everything is broken, and we’re going backwards as a country. That’s very demoralising.

“They’ve also had to witness the politics of self-entitlement and self-enhancement from Westminster… I’m not surprised that people feel disaffected by politics. But we do have to restore it.”

The Labour leader gave the interview before exit polls showed the far right in the lead after the first round of voting in the French parliamentary elections, but he nonetheless warned against “the rise of populism and nationalism”.

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Sir Keir expressed concern about the rise in support for the populist right across Europe, and for Reform in the UK.

“You have to understand why that’s happening,” he said. “It’s based in this disaffection, this sense that politics cannot be a force for good, and you can’t trust politicians.”

He argued that progressive parties and governments could restore faith, however, saying: “That goes back to credible hope, deliverable hope, making the change that will be material for people’s lives.”

Lib Dems on bereavement payment cuts

First minister John Swinney will also be out on the campaign trail today, reiterating his core message that Scots need an “alternative” to Labour in Westminster to “represent Scotland’s values”.

The SNP leader said in a statement that the general election in England is a “foregone conclusion”, with a Labour win on the cards, and claimed Sir Keir Starmer would “carry on with the same broken politics and right-wing policies as the Tories”.

He is arguing that the result in Scotland is on a “knife edge” – despite polls showing Labour in the lead – and that Sir Keir “simply represents more of the same broken Brexit Britain that does not reflect Scotland’s values”.

“The SNP is offering an alternative – a vision of hope with an end to austerity, rejoining the EU, eradicating child poverty and a future made in Scotland, for Scotland where Scotland’s interests are always put first,” said Mr Swinney.

“The only way to deliver that and put an end to the failure of Brexit which has caused so much damage to Scotland is to vote SNP on Thursday.

“Only the SNP offers Scotland the hope of a better future back in the EU – but we have to vote for it.”

Read more:
How Reform fares will also determine the Tories’ fate
Five things the main parties aren’t talking about this election
The science and ‘bunker’ security of the exit poll

Sir Ed Davey and the Liberal Democrats will be continuing their bid to take seats off the Tories – and are promoting a pledge they launched yesterday to reverse “heartless Tory cuts” to bereavement payments.

On the latter as it stands, a bereaved family where a spouse or partner has died receives a lump sum of up to £3,500, followed by a monthly payment of up to £350 for 18 months.

The party is calling for this period to be extended, and is pledging to inject an additional £440m a year into the system by 2028-29 to fund it.

‘Labour could take Wales for granted’

Plaid Cymru will be making their case to voters in Wales, arguing that the Welsh people will be “voiceless” if they do not have a “strong cohort” of MPs in Westminster.

The party’s leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth, said Wales “simply doesn’t feature” in Tory and Labour electoral plans, while his party would push for “fair funding deal for Wales”.

“When people vote on Thursday, they expect their MP to speak up for them and their community, not to follow the Westminster whip at any cost,” a statement said.

“We know that the Tories are finished and the contempt they show Wales is nothing new – but with Labour set to enter Downing Street on Friday, there is a real danger that they will simply take Wales for granted.”

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He added: “For a member of parliament who will always give Wales a voice in Westminster, who will always champion fairness and stand up against more cuts which have already devastated our public services, vote Plaid Cymru on 4 July.”

Reform UK will also be on the campaign trail as the party tries to stabilise its campaign following racism allegations.

Yesterday, one of the party’s candidates disowned them and backed the Tories, saying he had become “increasingly disillusioned” with the behaviour of the party and accused leader Nigel Farage of not taking it seriously.

It followed the controversy over a Reform canvasser who was caught making a racial slur about the prime minister in an undercover investigation.

Reform UK has also had to drop several election candidates because of racist remarks they have made.

They came in their droves: thousands of Reform supporters poured into a vast hall in a Birmingham conference centre on Sunday to hear Nigel Farage.

His backers brought with them Union Jacks, and brandished Reform placards. There were even one or two red baseball caps emblazoned with the slogan “Make Britain Great Again”, which seemed fitting for an event that felt quite Trumpian in style and tone.

Mr Farage came onto the stage to pounding music, smoke machines, fireworks, and a sea of “it’s time for Reform” placards to a 5,000-strong crowd with a speech that spoke about how Britain was broken and it was time for Reform.

He said his party would be the “leading voice of opposition” as he attacked ‘the establishment’ in all its guises, from the Conservative Party to Labour, the BBC, and Channel 4 to the Governor of the Bank of England.

Read more
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While detractors describe Mr Farage’s platform as a type of dog-whistle politics that does little but to stoke grievances and division, there is an audience for him and his policies that politicians in larger parties should ignore at their peril.

When I spoke to many people in the hall afterwards, they were overwhelmingly former Conservative voters disillusioned with their old party.

One woman, who had travelled over from Hull for the rally told me she thought there were a lot of “silent people who may be frightened to say they are voting Reform”.

“I think it’s going to be shock,” she said.

2024 is the election for ‘the other parties’

The rise of the ‘other’ parties is a clear theme of this election campaign as the Liberal Democrats, who won just 11 seats back in 2019, now eye getting back to the levels of seats they enjoyed – in the 1940s or 1950s – before it was wiped out in 2015 on the back of the coalition years.

Nigel Farage’s Reform, meanwhile, is on 16.2% in our Sky News poll tracker, just behind the Tories on 20%.

Earlier this month, the Conservatives fell behind Reform UK for the first time in a national poll, leaving the Tories gripped by panic and in despair.

Mr Farage likes to make the argument that Labour could be heading to a landslide on a lower voter share.

Recent analysis in the Financial Times suggested Labour could win a record 450 seats – about 70% – on just 41% of the votes, lower than the figure Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour achieved in 2017, while the Lib Dems could pick up 50 seats with a lower share of the vote than Reform with just a few seats at best. If it turns out anything like this, prepare for plenty of noise from Mr Farage.

Whether undecided voters or those leaning to Reform stick with them on Thursday is a big unknown of this election. Tories are nervous, knowing that big Reform votes piling up in their constituencies could cost them their seat.

In 2019, the majority of Conservatives did not have a threat from the right, as the Brexit Party stood down candidates with a Brexit-backing Conservative candidate. They stood but 275 or 632 seats.

This time around, Reform is everywhere and no one feels safe: one poll put James Cleverly’s Braintree constituency, supposedly the 19th safest Conservative seat, on a knife edge as Reform clocks up an estimated 22% vote share in his Essex constituency.

Tories in all-out war

The Conservatives, who began this campaign trying not to get into a fight with Mr Farage (perhaps for fear of further alienating their traditional voters) are now at all-out war as they try to salvage as many seats as they can.

On Sunday the party said if “just 130,000 voters currently considering a vote for Reform or the Lib Dems voted Conservative, it would be enough to stop Labour’s supermajority”.

The prime minister, meanwhile, has become increasingly vocal in his criticisms of Reform and Mr Farage as the party looks for a way to pull voters back.

Mr Sunak has been vocal in his criticism of Mr Farage as a “Putin appeaser” after the Reform leader suggested Ukraine enter peace talks – something which Ukraine has emphatically ruled out unless Russia retreats from its territory.

The prime minister also spoke of his “anger and hurt” over revelations – contested by Reform – in a Channel 4 undercover report of a Reform canvasser calling Mr Sunak a “f****** P***”.

This, combined with a Reform organiser making homophobic remarks and candidates being suspended for racist, antisemitic and sexist views has caused difficulties for Mr Farage in recent days.

Tensions around Farage starting to show

In our interview in Birmingham on Sunday, some of those tensions were beginning to show.

For a start, the politician who had appeared with right-wing Tories such as potential future leader Dame Priti Patel at the Conservative Party conference last October, and openly toyed about returning to the fold, now ruled out any sort of tie-up.

Having spoken but a month ago about a reverse takeover of the Tories and refusing to rule out one day rejoining the party, on Sunday he was clear he would not rejoin, and wanted nothing to do with the Conservatives.

It comes after a clutch of senior figures, including Dame Priti, indicated that Mr Farage would now not be welcomed back into the party in the wake of the backlash over his claim the West provoked Russia to invade Ukraine and the racism row engulfing Reform.

He equally was more equivocal than he had been about Andrew Tate in the past, making it clear to me that he “disavowed’ him, and was also highly critical of Reform events organiser George James who made homophobic remarks, saying he was “furious” when he saw the footage (also in the Channel 4 report) of Mr James describing the Pride flag as “degenerate” and criticising the police for displaying the flag.

“They should be out catching the n***** not promoting the f******”,” he said in the report.

Mr Farage said Mr James was “crass, drunken, rude and wrong” and told me he had been asked to remove his membership. But he also said he was “down a few drinks” explaining: “We could all say silly things when we’re a bit drunk.”

When I asked him if people really say things like this when they are drunk, Mr Farage said: “People say all sorts of things when they’re drunk and often don’t remember. But it was awful.”

So awful that one Reform candidate announced on Sunday evening they were standing down and would instead back their local Conservative in the constituency of Erewash.

The question for Reform is whether their potential voters, looking at some of the controversy surrounding the party, decide it’s not for them after all.

What is absolutely clear is Reform’s performance will help determine that of the Conservatives on Thursday night as the election results come in.

If he’s successful, Mr Farage will be heading for parliament, not only giving him a bigger national platform but a democratic mandate. That spells trouble for a Conservative party already in turmoil.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) says there’s a conspiracy of silence this election – that all of the major political parties aren’t being honest enough about their fiscal plans this election.

And they have a point. Most obviously (and this is the main thing the IFS is complaining about) none of the major manifestos – from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative parties – have been clear about how they will fill an impending black hole in the government’s spending plans.

No need to go into all the gritty details, but the overarching point is that all government spending plans include some broad assumptions about how much spending (and for that matter, taxes and economic growth) will grow in the coming years. Economists call this the “baseline”.

But there’s a problem with this baseline: it assumes quite a slow increase in overall government spending in the next four years, an average of about 1 per cent a year after accounting for inflation. Which doesn’t sound too bad except that we all know from experience that NHS spending always grows more quickly than that, and that 1 per cent needs to accommodate all sorts of other promises, like increasing schools and defence spending and so on.

If all those bits of government are going to consume quite a lot of that extra money (far more than a 1 per cent increase, certainly) then other bits of government won’t get as much. In fact, the IFS reckons those other bits of government – from the Home Office to the legal system – will face annual cuts of 3.5 per cent. In other words, it’s austerity all over again.

But here’s the genius thing (for the politicians, at least). While they have to set a baseline, to make all their other sums add up, the dysfunctional nature of the way government sets its spending budgets means it only has to fill in the small print about which department gets what when it does a spending review. And that spending review isn’t due until after the election.

The upshot is all the parties can pretend they’ve signed up to the baseline even when it’s patently obvious that more money will be needed for those unprotected departments (or else it’s a return to austerity).

So yes, the IFS is right: the numbers in each manifesto, including Labour’s, are massively overshadowed by this other bigger conspiracy of silence.

But I would argue that actually the conspiracy of silence goes even deeper. Because it’s not just fiscal baselines we’re not talking about enough. Consider five other issues none of the major parties is confronting (when I say major parties, in this case I’m talking about the Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem manifestos – to some extent the Green and Reform manifestos are somewhat less guilty of these particular sins, even if they commit others).

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Taxes going up

First, for all their promises not to raise any of the major tax rates (something Labour, the Conservatives and Lib Dems have all committed to) the reality is taxes are going up. We will all be paying more in taxes by the end of the parliament compared with today.

Indeed, we’ll all be paying more income tax. Except that we’ll be paying more of it because we’ll be paying tax on more of our income – that’s the inexorable logic of freezing the thresholds at which you start paying certain rates of tax (which is what this government has done – and none of the other parties say they’ll reverse).

Second, the main parties might say they believe in different things, but they all seem to believe in one particular offbeat religion: the magic tax avoidance money tree. All three of these manifestos assume they will make enormous sums – more, actually, than from any single other money-raising measure – from tightening up tax avoidance rules.

While it’s perfectly plausible that you could raise at least some money from clamping down on tax avoidance, it’s hardly a slam-dunk. That this is the centrepiece of each party’s money-raising efforts says a lot. And, another thing that’s often glossed over: raising more money this way will also raise the tax burden.

Third is another thing all the parties agree on and are desperate not to question: the fiscal rules. The government has a set of rules requiring it to keep borrowing and (more importantly given where the numbers are right now) total debt down to a certain level.

But here’s the thing. These rules are not god-given. They are not necessarily even all that good. The debt rule is utterly gameable. It hasn’t stopped the Conservatives raising the national debt to the highest level in decades. And it’s not altogether clear the particular measure of debt being used (net debt excluding Bank of England interventions) is even the right one.

Which raises another micro-conspiracy. Of all the parties at this election, the only one talking about whether the Bank of England should really be paying large sums in interest to banks as it winds up its quantitative easing programme is the Reform Party. This policy, first posited by a left-wing thinktank (the New Economics Foundation) is something many economists are discussing. It’s something the Labour Party will quite plausibly carry out to raise some extra money if it gets elected. But no one wants to discuss it. Odd.

Brexit impact

Anyway, the fourth issue everyone seems to have agreed not to discuss is, you’ve guessed it, Brexit. While the 2019 election was all about Brexit, this one, by contrast, has barely featured the B word. Perhaps you’re relieved. For a lot of people we’ve talked so much about Brexit over the past decade or so that, frankly, we need a bit of a break. That’s certainly what the main parties seem to have concluded.

But while the impact of leaving the European Union is often overstated (no, it’s not responsible for every one of our economic problems) it’s far from irrelevant to our economic plight. And where we go with our economic neighbours is a non-trivial issue in the future.

Anyway, this brings us to the fifth and final thing no one is talking about. The fact that pretty much all the guff spouted on the campaign trail is completely dwarfed by bigger international issues they seem reluctant or ill-equipped to discuss. Take the example of China and electric cars.

Just recently, both the US and European Union have announced large tariffs on the import of Chinese EVs. Now, in America’s case those tariffs are primarily performative (the country imports only a tiny quantity of Chinese EVs). But in Europe‘s case Chinese EVs are a very substantial part of the market – same for the UK.

Raising the question: what is the UK going to do? You could make a strong case for saying Britain should be emulating the EU and US, in an effort to protect the domestic car market. After all, failing to impose tariffs will mean this country will have a tidal wave of cars coming from China (especially since they can no longer go to the rest of the continent without facing tariffs) which will make it even harder for domestic carmakers to compete. And they’re already struggling to compete.

By the same token, imposing tariffs will mean the cost of those cheap Chinese-made cars (think: MGs, most Teslas and all those newfangled BYDs and so on) will go up. A lot. Is this really the right moment to impose those extra costs on consumers.

In short, this is quite a big issue. Yet it hasn’t come up as a big issue in this campaign. Which is madness. But then you could say the same thing about, say, the broader race for minerals, about net zero policy more widely and about how we’re going to go about tightening up sanctions on Russia to make them more effective.

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Parochial election

Elections are always parochial but given the scale of these big, international issues (and there are many more), this one feels especially parochial.

So in short: yes, there have been lots of gaps. Enormous gaps. The “conspiracy of silence” goes way, way beyond the stuff the IFS has talked about.

But ’twas ever thus.

Read more:
Why the US is imposing 100% tariff on Chinese electric cars
Rapid steps needed for Britain to compete in green revolution

Think back to the last time a political party actually confronted some long-standing issues no one wanted to talk about in their manifesto. I’m talking about the 2017 Conservative manifesto, which pledged to resolve the mess of social care in this country, once and for all.

It sought to confront a big social issue, intergenerational inequality, in so doing ensuring younger people wouldn’t have to subsidise the elderly.

The manifesto was an absolute, abject, electoral disaster. It was largely responsible for Theresa May‘s slide in the polls from a 20 point lead to a hung parliament.

And while most people don’t talk about that manifesto anymore, make no mistake: today’s political strategists won’t forget it in a hurry. Hence why this year’s campaign and this year’s major manifestos are so thin.

Elections are rarely won on policy proposals. But they are sometimes lost on them.