Rishi Sunak claims he has ‘made progress’ on five priorities at first major campaign event – UK politics live | Politics

On the NHS, Sunak said that the government had not made “significant enough” progress on cutting waiting lists. That was partly because of the strikes, he said. But he said, without strikes, waitings lists could come down. And he said the goverment was acting to strengthen the NHS.

On the economy, he said inflation had halved and the national insurance cut had just taken effect.

And he said Keir Starmer would just take the UK “back to square one”.

He’s been leader of the opposition for four years now. And in that time, he hasn’t said what he would do differently.

That’s because he does not have a plan. He just snipes from the sidelines …

He doesn’t have a plan for Britain because he’s more interested in political game playing and saying as little as possible to get votes.

That’s not my approach. I’m prepared to take the difficult decisions for the long-term benefit of our country and you saw me do that, after the pandemic, [making] a decision to reduce overseas aid given the other demands we had on our public finances, being restrained and fair on public sector pay, charting a new pragmatic course on net zero that gets us there but saves you thousands of pounds.

Labour, of course, would dispute this. The party has published five missison set it in considerable detail what policies it would implement in key areas.

Rishi Sunak has just started his PM Connect event. He is in Accrington in Lancashire.

He starts by claiming he has “made progress” on the five priorities he set out last year.

(That is not the view of expert bodies like the Institute for Government, which said last week he was likely to fail to meet three of them.)

Keir Starmer has been in Loughborough to witness the impact of the recent flooding. In an interview with broadcasters, he said there were three things the government should be doing in relation to the Post Office Horizon scandal.

These convictions, the remaining convictions need to be looked at en masse …

I think all the convictions need to be looked at because there’s a root cause of the problem here.

The government could pass legislation, so obviously we’d support that if they did.

It might be possible to get these cases back before the court of appeal quickly – I’ve done that when I was a prosecutor – but whichever way it’s done, these convictions need to be looked at.

Prof Chris Hodges, chair of the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board, has also called for a collective approach to overturning convictions. He told the BBC this morning: “A civilised state should overturn these convictions and deliver compensation with people having to do as little as possible.” One option would be for parliament to pass a law pardoning or exonerating those convicted, and Hodges argued that this would not encroach on the rights of the judiciary.

I think that the prosecution should be taken out of the hands of the Post Office and given to the Crown Prosecution Service. I used to run the Crown Prosecution Service, we’ve prosecuted for other departments, we can do it here – that should be done straightaway.

Compensation needs to be paid, that’s already allocated for in the Treasury – they need to get on and pay that.

The Post Office Horizon scandal relates to the unsafe prosecution of hundreds of sub-post office operators, starting in 1999, when Labour was in office, and going on until 2015, at which point the Conservatives had been in power for five years. Yet it seems to be the Liberal Democrats who are in most peril over the scandal at the moment. The Lib Dems were in coalition with the Tories between 2010 and 2015 and, as doubts about the Post Office prosecutions grew, the two postal affairs ministers were first Ed Davey (2010 to 2012) and then Jo Swinson (2012 to 2015), both serving in the business department led by Vince Cable. Davey is now Lib Dem leader, and Swinson and Cable were his two most recent predecessors.

Yesterday the Sunday Times used its splash to focus in particular on the role of Davey. In their story Caroline Wheeler and Harry Yorke said:

The Sunday Times can also disclose that Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, was warned 12 years ago that legal action against the Post Office over the accounting scandal could leave the taxpayer exposed to “astronomical” costs.

Alan Bates, the former sub-postmaster who has led the long-running campaign for justice, warned of the huge potential “financial liability” in a 2011 letter to Davey, then minister for postal affairs.

The correspondence is one of at least five letters Bates sent him between 2010 and 2012, when he was the responsible minister, as the sub-postmasters repeatedly urged the coalition government to intervene and help them secure justice.

Bim Afolami, a Treasury minister, told LBC this morning that Davey needed to do more to explain how he responded to the concerns raised with him at the time. Asked if he thought Davey should consider his position over this, he replied:

To be honest, I’m not one who goes around saying that (someone) needs to resign, but I do think he needs to do is he needs to be honest with people and explain why as a minister, he didn’t ask the right questions.

In my job, you get a huge amount of information, there are a lot of people in the civil service who are working very hard on your behalf, but what you have to do is you have to ask the key questions and interrogate what you’re told.

And I think that Sir Ed needs to explain what he was told [and] why he allowed certain things to develop in the way that they did.

Davey has said he was ‘“deeply misled” by Post Office bosses about what was happening.

A petition calling for the former Post Office chief executive, Paula Vennells, to lose her CBE over the Horizon scandal has attracted more than 1 million signatures, Kevin Rawlinson reports.

Alok Sharma, the former Cop26 president and former Conservative cabinet minister, will not be voting for the Rishi Sunak’s oil and gas bill tonight, criticising it as a sign the government was “not serious” about meeting its international climate commitments. As Helena Horton reports, Sharma told the Today programme this morning:

What this bill does do is reinforce that unfortunate perception about the UK rowing back from climate action.

We saw this last autumn with the chopping and changing of some policies and actually not being serious about our international commitments. Just a few weeks ago at Cop28 the UK government signed up to transition away from fossil fuels. This bill is actually about doubling down on new oil and gas licences. It is actually the opposite of what we agreed to do internationally, so I won’t be supporting it …

The government has said this bill is about protecting energy security. But the reality is, the oil and gas extracted from the north sea is owned by private companies – the government doesn’t get to control who they sell to. And the price of oil and gas is set internationally so it won’t actually lower domestic energy bills either.

Here is Helena’s full story.

Good morning. There are three types of campaign you can run during an election: ‘it’s time for a change’ (normally an opposition message, but a governing party can also campaign like this, as Boris Johnson did in 2019); ‘give us time to finish the job’ (the standard incumbent’s message); or (the last resort option) ‘you might not like us, but at least we’re not as bad as the other lot’.

Other things being equal, the change message is normally the most powerful one, and for a few weeks last autumn Rishi Sunak tried hard to make the case that he was the candidate best equipped to offer change. Leading a party in office for more than 13 years, it was a hard sell and eventually Sunak accepted that as an argument it was implausible. Today, after some low-key meetings last week, he is doing his first major campaign event of the year, a PM Connect Q&A with voters in the north-west of England. And, according to a quote released overnight, he will formally adopt message 2 as the Conservative party’s election theme. He will say:

The choice is whether we stick with the plan that is starting to deliver the long-term change our country needs, or go back to square one with the Labour party.

The problem for Sunak is that it is increasingly questionable whether this argument is credible either. “Stick with the plan that is starting to deliver,” he will say, but as Kiran Stacey reports, some of his MPs believe that the only honest campaign message is ‘we may be rubbish, but at least we’re not Labour’. As Kiran says, the Conservative MP Danny Kruger told Conservative party members at a private event last autumn:

The narrative that the public has now firmly adopted – that over 13 years things have got worse – is one we just have to acknowledge and admit.

Some things have been done right and well. The free school movement that Michael Gove oversaw, and universal credit – and Brexit, even though it was in the teeth of the Tory party hierarchy itself, and mismanaged – nevertheless Brexit will be the great standing achievement of our time in office.

These things are significant, but, overall I’m afraid, if we leave office next year, we would have left the country sadder, less united and less conservative than when we found it.

Kruger also said that the Conservatives were at risk of “obliteration” if they did not become more responsive to the needs of the electorate.

Kruger is not just any random backbencher. He is co-chair of the New Conservatives, a new group of rightwing Tory MPs that is about to go to battle with the government in the next few weeks over amendments to the Rwanda bill.

With luck, Sunak will be asked about these comments at the Q&A – although that is not guaranteed, because most of the questions will come from members of the public, not journalists.

Here is the agenda for the day.

10am: Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s first minister, gives a speech on Scottish independence.

11am: Rishi Sunak holds a PM Connect Q&A event in the north-west of England.

Morning: Keir Starmer is visiting the victims of flooding in the east Midlands.

Noon: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

After 3.30pm: There is likely to be a ministerial statement on flooding. Another minister may make a statement, or respond to an urgent question, on the Post Office Horizon scandal. At some point today Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, and Kevin Hollinrake, the minister for the Post Office, are meeting to discuss how convictions might be cleared swiftly.

Late afternoon: MPs debate the second reading of the offshore petroleum licensing bill.

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